Writers Read at EMU Homecoming to feature Faith Eidse ’79

Faith Eidse ’79 will read from her bestselling novel, Healing Falls (Faitheyes Press, 2018), during an Eastern Mennonite University Writers Read event at 8 p.m., Saturday, Oct. 12. She will read in Common Grounds coffee house in the University Commons. The reading is one of many events during the university’s Homecoming and Family Weekend.

At a critical time for families in detention, Eidse is raising her voice for restorative justice. This interest in a higher form of justice was fostered by her studies at EMU during the late ’70s where she learned about a justice that seeks to meet the needs of all parties involved in a crime, including victims, offenders and communities.

Dedicated to the women inside, Healing Falls “explores critical issues facing the American justice system, as well as the power of faith and artistic expression to transform lives,” writes author Donna Meredith.

“Childhood separation anxiety finds its expression … amidst family separations on our southern border.” said Tom Flannagan on WFSU/NPR.

Writer’s Digest judged Healing Falls, “Moving, noble, timely,” and of great impact in promoting understanding of mothers in prison.

Eidse was inspired to write Healing Falls after volunteering six years in women’s prisons of Northwest Florida. There, she resonated with the suffering and resilience of inmates, especially mothers separated from children. She, too, was separated from her missionary family during revolution and schooling in Congo. She was raised among worlds, in Congo/Zaire, Canada and the U.S.

 “Healing Falls offers a vision of real, important prison reform and a clear call for social justice and mother-child reunion,” wrote Nina Sichel co-editor with Eidse of two collections on growing up global. One is a Hachette title, Unrooted Childhoods (now a Princeton textbook), and the other is Writing Out of Limbo, a bestseller for Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Inc., England.

Eidse won the 2007 Florida Historical Society oral history award for Voices of the Apalachicola and the Kingsbury Award for her memoir writing. She has published a biography of her Canadian missionary parents, Light the World.

Eidse is a writer in Tallahassee where she has taught more than 20 years at Florida State, Keiser and Barry universities.

Healing Falls will be for sale at the Writers Read event and on Amazon.