Author of 2023 Sarton Memoir Award Co-Winner
Love in the Archives: A Patchwork of True Stories About Suicide Loss
About five years after the death of her fifteen-year-old daughter Lydia, Eileen Vorbach Collins started a Spiritual and Pastoral graduate program. Many, if not all, the written assignments for her master’s thesis ended up being about support groups for survivors of suicide loss. From these papers, journal notes, and published essays came her book, Love in the Archives—one of the two outstanding memoir entries recognized in the 2023 Sarton Award competition. The book is a collection of narrative essays incorporating themes of surviving suicide loss, Judaism, interfaith marriage, and mental illness.
A Baltimore native, Eileen is a graduate of the University of Maryland School of Nursing and Loyola University. “I don’t remember when I started writing,” Eileen comments, “but it was after Lydia died. I’d write something in a journal . . . a bit of a remembered dream or memory, something I wanted to tell her. Then I’d come across that entry months or years later and wonder where it came from. It was my handwriting, but I had no memory of having written it.”
Eileen says after she had published a number of essays in various journals with the common theme of surviving grief, she decided to keep going until there was a book. Some of those essays, by the way, won the Diana Woods Memorial Award for Creative Nonfiction, the Gabriele Rico Challenge Award, and the Glenna Luschei Prairie Schooner Award. And in addition to winning a Sarton, Love in the Archives has also garnered a Gold Royal Palm Award from the Florida Writers Association and a Pencraft Award for Literary Excellence.
The author says she chose to write the book as a collection of essays because “grieving people often have limited attention spans. I’ve heard over and over that once-avid (grieving) readers could no longer get through a book or even watch a movie. I wanted my book to be in manageable bits. Read one or two and put it down.”
As for becoming a writer and finding support, Eileen says she had the good fortune to find and join several great writing groups. “Most recently, a group of four memoirists. We named ourselves Writer’s Tears (after an Irish whiskey), and all of us now have a book in the world or soon to be born. It really does take a village. Solitude is good, but writing gets lonely. Without my writing friends, I don’t know that I’d have had the perseverance to make it to publication. Dragging out that birth metaphor, I’ve written about other friends as being word doulas.”
Eileen says winning the Sarton Award boosted her confidence. “I’m pleased with the response from readers. Clearly, mine is a book with a niche audience and it’s always a pleasant surprise to hear from a reader who is not a suicide survivor but understands the long-term nature of grief.” As for the future, she says she will continue to write and publish essays in literary journals and more mainstream magazines and be a guest on a few blogs. She especially likes flash and micro writing styles, both fiction and nonfiction, and poetry. “I’ve published a few poems. That always surprises me. I may have another book in me, but having opened a vein to write this one, I’ll try fiction.”
Recently, Eileen was featured in Newsweek’s “My Turn,” in which she wrote about an impulsive decision, at age 70, to get her first tattoo. It was a semicolon on her forearm to honor Project Semicolon, a mental health advocacy program started in 2013 that reminds people their story isn’t over. The semicolon has since become the universal logo for mental health and suicide prevention.
“I’ve become fascinated by tattoos, especially those with a grief connection and have started thinking about an anthology. I’d love to gather those stories,” says Eileen.
Meanwhile, the Sarton winner says she finds support in a community of bereaved parents who understand her pain on a level that others cannot. No one in the group places a time limit on this grief. But Eileen also says that as the years have passed, and as she has found ways to honor her daughter’s memories, she has learned to laugh again.
