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Sheila Ballantyne
Sheila Caroline Ballantyne (née Weibert; July 26, 1937 – May 2, 2007) was an American novelist and short story writer. Her work primarily focused on the shifting roles of women during first-wave feminism.[1] BiographyBallantyne was born Sheila Caroline Weibert in Seattle, Washington.[1] Ballantyne's mother died of cancer when she Ballantyne ten years old, and she and her sister were raised by her widowed father in Seattle.[1][2] After graduating high school, she enrolled at Mills College in San Francisco, studying writing.[1] After college, Ballantyne worked in the medical records department of Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco.[2] There, she met Philip Spielman, a psychoanalyst whom she subsequently married.[2] The couple had one son, Stefan, and a daughter, Anya.[1] She published her debut novel, Norma Jean and the Termite Queen, in 1975, using her mother's maiden name of Ballantyne as a pen name.[1] In 1982, Ballantyne published the semi-autobiographical Imaginary Crimes, which documents the upbringing of two young girls in 1960s Portland, Oregon.[1] The novel helped earn Ballantyne a Guggenheim Fellowship the following year,[2] and was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1994, starring Harvey Keitel, Fairuza Balk, Kelly Lynch, Vincent D'Onofrio, and Elisabeth Moss.[1] Beginning in 1984, she began teaching writing at Mills College, her alma mater, where she worked for 12 years.[1] In 1988, she published Life on Earth, a collection of short stories which present death as a nameless personified villain.[1] Ballantyne died at her home in Berkeley, California, on May 2, 2007, of multisystem atrophy, aged 69.[1] Bibliography
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