BURNHAM, Sophy 1936-

PERSONAL: Born December 12, 1936, in Baltimore, MD; daughter of George Cochran (an attorney) and Sophy Tayloe (Snyder) Doub; married David Bright Burnham (a journalist), March 12, 1960 (divorced, 1984); children: Sarah Tayloe, Molly Bright. Ethnicity: "WASP." Education: University of Florence, certification of study, 1957; Smith College, B.A. (cum laude), 1958. Politics: "Honesty; independent/democrat."

ADDRESSES: Home—1405 31st St. NW, Washington, DC 20007. Agent—Anne Edelstein, 20 W. 22nd St. #1603, New York, NY 10010. E-mail—Sophyb@erols. com

CAREER: Author and playwright. Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, assistant curator for museum services, 1962-64; David McKay Co., New York, NY, associate editor, 1972-74; Fund for New American Plays, Kennedy Center, New York, NY, executive director, 1992-96. Studio Theatre, Washington, DC, founding member, 1978, interim chairman of board, 1978-80; DC Community Humanities Council of National Endowment for the Humanities, founding member, 1979-85, vice chairman, 1979-80; The Octagon, Architects Institute of America, member of board of directors, 1984-89. Consultant to numerous organizations, including Arts International, National Park Service, Environmental Protection Agency, Institute for Law and Social Research, Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Mitre Corporation.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Authors League of American Playwrights Forum, The Cosmos Club.

AWARDS, HONORS: Best magazine feature award, National Steeplechase and Hunt Association, 1970; Daughter of Mark Twain, Mark Twain Society, 1974; University of Minnesota Office of Advanced Drama Research grant, 1976; third prize, Episcopal Drama Award, Episcopal Foundation for Drama, 1979, and first prize, Women's Theatre Award, 1981, both for Penelope; Best Children's Radio Play designation, National Association of Community Broadcasters, 1980, for The Witch's Tale; Award of Excellence, Communications Arts magazine, 1980, for article "Machu Picchu"; DC Arts and Humanities Council grants, 1980-81; Helene Wurlitzer Foundation grants, 1981, 1983, 1991; Virginia Duvall Mann Award, new play category, Charlotte Theatre Festival, 1993, for Snowstorms.

WRITINGS:

The Art Crowd, D. McKay (New York, NY), 1973.

(Editor) C. D. Brennan and others, Threat to Licensed Nuclear Facilities, Mitre Corp. (Washington, DC), 1975.

Buccaneer (young adult novel), Warne (New York, NY), 1977.

The Landed Gentry, Putnam (New York, NY), 1978.

The Dogwalker (young adult novel), Warne (New York, NY), 1979.

A Book of Angels: Reflections on Angels Past and Present and True Stories of How They Touch Our Lives, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1990.

Angel Letters, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1991.

Revelations, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1992.

The President's Angel: A Novel, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1993.

For Writers Only, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1994.

The Ecstatic Journey: The Transforming Power of Mystical Experience, Ballantine (New York, NY), 1997.

The Path of Prayer: Reflections on Prayer and True Stories of How It Affects Our Lives, Viking (New York, NY), 2002.

The Treasure of Montségur: A Novel, HarperSanFransisco (San Francisco, CA), 2002.

other

Music of Shakespeare's England (television screenplay), Smithsonian Institution, 1962.

The Smithsonian's Whale (short film), Smithsonian Institution, 1963.

The Leaf Thieves (short film), Smithsonian Institution, 1964.

Penelope (play), produced by New Playwrights Theatre, 1976, broadcast on Pacifica National Radio, 1977.

The Study (play), reworked as Snowstorms, produced by Charlotte Repertory Theater, 1993.

The Meaning of Life (play), produced by Arena Stage, 2001.

Prometheus (play), produced by Studio Theatre (Washington DC), 2002.

Also author of audio tapes Piercing the Veil: Crossing into the Mystical Realm (three cassettes), Sounds True Inc., 1997 and What To Do When You Are Hurt or in Need (four cassettes), Sounds True Inc., 1999. Author of radio plays The Witch's Tale, Beauty and the Beast, and The Nightingale, broadcast on National Public Radio's Children's Radio Theatre.

Contributor to books and anthologies, including Crime in the City, edited by Daniel Glaser, Harper & Row, 1970; Cities in Trouble, edited by Nathan Glazer, Quadrangle, 1970; Living Alive, by Flora Davis, Doubleday, (New York, NY), 1980; Literary Angels, edited by Harriet Scott Chessman, Ballantine Books, 1994; Embracing Our Essence: Spiritual Conversations with Prominent Women, by Susan Skog, Health Communications Inc., 1995; Vision of Angels: 35 Photographers Share Their Images, by Nelson Bloncourt and Karen Engelman, Smithmark Publishers, 1998; Das Neue Grosse Praxisbuch Der Esoterik, by Wilhelm Goldmann, edited by Diane Von Weltzien, Munich, 1998; Table for Two, Please, edited by Brian Luke Seaward, Bookpartners Inc., 1998; and Smith Voices: Selected Works by Smith College Alumnae, Smith College Press, 1999. Contributor to periodicals, including Esquire, New York, New York Times, Realites, Redbook, and numerous foreign magazines. Contributing editor to Town and Country, 1975-80, and to New Woman, 1984-1989.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Firegirl, a novel.

SIDELIGHTS: A brush with death led novelist Sophy Burnham to write her 1990 volume A Book of Angels: Reflections on Angels Past and Present and True Stories of How They Touch Our Lives. In the book, Burnham recounts how her life was saved in an unusual skiing accident. She was tumbling toward a cliff when suddenly she was stopped against the planted legs of a stranger in black. Without speaking, he disappeared. Burnham once explained to CA: "I did not grow up believing in miracles or angels, but when I was twenty-eight an angel saved my life. For years I hid the fact from myself, and nearly twenty years later I began collecting stories of people who had seen angels and had their lives saved by them. In A Book of Angels I explore not only present-day encounters but also the understanding of angels throughout history and in different cultures. The stories appear along with quotations from poets, mystics, and saints, including Milton, Dante, Goethe, [and] Blake, [as well as] the Koran, the Bible, and others."

"A book about angels could easily go wrong, being too sentimental, unscholarly, unfocused or badly written," said Chicago Tribune Books reviewer Phyllis Theroux, reviewing A Book of Angels. However, the critic continued, Burnham "avoids all these pitfalls" and through her book "illuminates the tough, tiring and sometimes miraculous business of living, where angels sometimes help out. 'Are there really forces,' Burnham asks, 'that dive, invisible, into our petty affairs?' She makes an awfully good case for it."

A Book of Angels was the first in a series of books Burnham penned on angels, mysticism, and the spiritual dimension. Angel Letters followed in 1991, and two years later, in 1993, the short and philosophical novel, The President's Angel. In this futuristic book about the United States and the Enemy, in which military developments threaten the destruction of the world, an angel suddenly appears to U.S. President Matthew Adams, shaking the most powerful man on earth to his very core. The question of the book concerns what happens when you have a spiritual experience and what happens to you and others afterwards. Burnham told CA: "the book should be named 'The Angel's Story' since it sees the world from the point of view of God." A Publishers Weekly critic commented that while The President's Angel might seem simplistic to some, Burnham "urges an ethic of individual choice and responsibility."

Burnham delves into the world of self-help with her instructional book For Writers Only. In this work she tells of her personal struggles with writing and acknowledges the many difficulties for new, anxious writers. She honestly discusses the year she quit writing altogether and also includes quotes from famous writers who have struggled with their craft. "It's all enjoyable, readable, inspiring," acknowledged Pat Monaghan in a review for Booklist.

Burnham's novel Revelations took twelve years to write. The novelist once described the work as "a story of friendship and betrayal, of love and fear, and of the junction of spiritual and erotic love. It concerns an Episcopal minister, a love affair, a mystical revelation of God, and ultimately the ecclesiastical trial to which [the minister] is brought." Narrated by the minister's best friend as he recalls events now thirty years in the past, Revelations is an exploration of the spiritual journey and the search for identity and love. Burnham's 2002 work of fiction, The Treasure of Montségur is set in thirteenth-century France and revolves around Cathars, ultra-orthodox followers of Christ who believed the world was the creation of the devil, to be abhorred, and that their task was to live in the path of Christ by lives of chastity, truth and sanctity. In 1243 the French army trapped 220 Cathars on the top of the mountain of Montségur, together with their treasure and of untold wealth. Before the fortress was taken, however the Cathars smuggled their treasure through the French lines and hid it underground (it has never been found), then lowered three 'good men' on ropes down the sheer cliff to vanish into the countryside and thus continue their church of love.

In her novel, Burnham's heroine, Jeanne, raised as an orphan by the Cathars, has lost the three 'good men' who were in her charge. She is on the run as the Cathars are being hunted and burned at the stake under the dictates of the Church-led Inquisition. Maddened by what she has seen, homeless and haunted, she meets Jerome, who risks his life to save her. A romance ensues as Jeanne tells Jerome the story of her life, including her childhood when she was sent to the Bishop of Montségur for instruction. A Kirkus Reviews writer said that Burnham "mixes romance with religious history in an evocative prose that should thrill the spiritually intrigued." A Publishers Weekly critic agreed, noting that The Treasure of Montségur is "an energetic, psychological imagining of the Cathar legend." Zachary Karabell in the Los Angeles Times also praised the book, writing that Burnham "crafts a beautiful, wondrous novel out of the persecutions the Cathars faced for their beliefs."

Burnham once told CA: "I first knew I was a writer at the age of ten, when I failed my fifth-grade English exam. I failed because the first question was: 'Finish this paragraph.' Forty-five minutes and two bluebooks later, when the bell rang, I was still writing and came out of my trance astonished and confused. I had never gotten to the second question. It took another fifteen years to take the dare and begin to write.

"If I don't write for a certain amount of time in a given period I get ugly like a junkie without a fix….The fact that people sometimes pay me to write is a surprise bonus of the craft. But sometimes they do not. I write anyway. Still, I sometimes go through periods of drought, and if I have any suggestion on what a writer needs, it is to cultivate the sensitivity of a butterfly (for observation), a skin of a rhino (for rejection) and the tenacity of a bulldog (for keeping on keeping on). Most of writing is revision—I rewrite, rewrite, rewrite. My question: How to make it clearer? My immediate aim is to forge sentences so clear and compelling that the reader's eye keeps moving to the next page. For me, the writing itself, the singing of the song, gives pleasure. If the finished song touches another man's heart or mind, that's a miracle: I am filled with humility."

"If the singing of the song is what gives me pleasure, then I have to admit there are times when the music does not come: no sound, no words. Or rather words are there, but without form and structure. Then I read. I talk. I listen to others. I consider muse on the stories I am being told. I remind myself that such periods form a part of the writing process—the artistic process. All writers, all artists, all musicians. Sometimes you have to allow time for the well to fill up.

"People ask me sometimes which is my favorite book, expecting me perhaps to answer A Book of Angels, which is my most celebrated, and which has touched people around the world. I know that. That book has changed the way that people perceive the world, and given hope to millions. But I have to admit that each of my books is my favorite—each different, each one struggling to comprehend a different question. To ask that question of an author is like asking a mother which is her favorite child: 'All of them!' she responds, taking pleasure in the individuality of each one.

"I am so thankful that I have been given the opportunity to spend this lifetime doing something that gives me so much pleasure. It's a paradox that pleasure comes with difficulty and pain.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

periodicals

Booklist, November 1, 1994, Pat Monaghan, review of For Writers Only, p. 472.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 2002, p. 510.

Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1990; June 8, 2002, Zachary Karabell, review of The Treasure of Montségur, p. B20.

Milwaukee Journal, May 20, 1973.

Newsday, March 22, 1973; July 9, 1978.

Newsweek, April 9, 1973.

New York Times, March 27, 1973.

New York Times Book Review, March 25, 1973; July 2, 1978.

People, May 17, 1993, Marilyn Achiron, "The Halo Effect," p. 75; April 11, 1994, Barbara Graham, review of The President's Angel, p. 28.

Progressive, September, 1978.

Publishers Weekly, August 9, 1993, review of The President's Angel, p. 450; September 19, 1994, review of For Writers Only, p. 56; March 18, 2002, review of The Treasure of Montségur, p. 74.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), August 12, 1990.

Washington Post, April 15, 1990.

Washington Post Book World, March 25, 1973.*