Gary Smith
Author of They Come Back Singing
When did you start reading and what did you like to read as a kid?
I began reading from the first days of school. My family read a lot. As a kid: depends on what kid you are talking about. I probably began serious reading in high school, after I did a paper in English studies on Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. I had a teacher who always pursued me with the jolting question: “What do you think the author was trying to say?” Yikes!
When you were growing up did you have books in your home?
Everywhere.
When did you think about becoming a writer? Was there someone who got you interested in writing?
I never thought about becoming a writer, although I have always loved good writing. It was only later in life, when my experiences with the poor needed to be expressed to a larger public that I decided to write a book. I was encouraged in this attitude by Lynn Martin, a Northwest poet, who was a volunteer at Nativity House, a drop-in center for street people in Tacoma, Washington, which I directed. Out of my experience on the Tacoma streets I wrote, with Lynn’s loving help, Street Journal (Sheed and Ward, 1994).
How do you write? Do you have a daily routine? What’s good about it? What do you hate about it?
I journal. Everyday. That is presuming that there is something worthwhile to write about. Thomas Merton said that journals take for granted that in everyday in our life there is something new and important. I agree. Since most of the past forty years of my life have been in dicey ministerial situations, including the last several years in Uganda with the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), there is plenty to write about. And, too, especially in the tension and fatigue of the streets of the USA or in the Sudanese villages of northern Uganda, writing keeps me focused and sane.
I like writing about what is happening externally and internally in my life. It is a way to tap the movements of my heart and also it can challenge me to express and communicate myself more clearly. I cannot say that I ever disliked writing even on the cloudy days of disappointment or disgust—with myself or the world around me. In it all God lives and moves and breathes. I want to be attentive to that central truth and writing helps me to break it open.
Any particular story to tell concerning the writing of this book?
Two: First: Writer Walker Percy’s editor, Caroline Gordon, told him that his business as a novelist was to imitate Christ, in the sense that He, Christ, was about His Father’s business every moment of his life. Gordon reminded Percy that he too, like Jesus, must be about the Father’s business: Incarnation. That is to say that Percy was urged to make his word flesh and to let it dwell among people. That notion attracts me and my copy editor, Loyola Press’ Heidi Hill, always reminded me that what I had to say about my experience required that I put the word down and let it live.
Second: There is the story in my book, They Come Back Singing, about Andalinda Yayo, a blind and crawling-crippled elderly Sudanese woman. She was radiant with goodness. I knew on the morning that I left her small hut for the last time (I visited her whenever I came to her village) that if I said nothing else in my life, I had to tell her story. Yayo was wonderfully typical of many Sudanese women refugees I knew. Her transparent holiness in the midst of all the crap and chaos around her simply rescued and uncovered my soul in a way I had not known. What a woman.
Will any of your friends in African see your book?
Of course. I had some rough pours of the book sent to a few friends there and copies will be on the way to others that I knew in the villages as well as Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) staff.
How did writing this book change you?
You know, it is not so much that the writing changed me. It is more like my experience with the Sudanese refugees changed me. Writing about that experience helped me to touch and embrace once again what had happened to me. Some events and people and episodes in our life simply transform us and often hurl us into a new way of looking at ourselves and reality. Who has not been changed by another’s love or by personal suffering? Who has not been captured by an idea/ideal that utterly redirected his or her life? Who has not known the moment of grace that seized us, shook us and unalterably changed us? So those years in Africa.
Living with and knowing the people I served when I was with JRS was the occasion of deeper wisdom and understanding. Herein lays the change. Of what? This: of my heart’s capacity to love and give, of my ability to stretch beyond my own culture, and of the Church’s inescapable longing to discover the best in Herself among the poor. Pivoting out of this realization, I learned that if we choose not to grow in wisdom and understanding, then we will tie ourselves—like jackals—to the stakes of the comfortable and the unquestioning. If that happens we lose—in my opinion—track of ourselves and the Church loses track of what She is about.
The book was my effort to express—like a musician claiming the songs of his heart—such wisdom and understanding as it was born in me. I don’t say that like whoopee for me or look, what an insightful guy I am. I say it with humility because I know I did not teach myself; I learned in the presence of the Sudanese. They were the agents of my change; they taught me wisdom and understanding. The poor can do such things.
What is some good advice that you’ve received concerning writing? What some advice you could offer young writers?
It seems to me that the answer to these questions is the same. It is important to write out of one’s strength, to write (and speak) about what you know. That is the starting point. It is important—whether poetically or not—to communicate what one has authority about. I am reminded of a clarifying episode at the aforementioned Nativity House where this truth became clear to me. After breakfast on Sundays we cleared the tables and I said Mass for the assembled street people. Once, in the middle of one of my more brilliant homilies, a tough old street veteran stood up, folded his arms and asked politely, “So what’s the point, Father?” I laughed because he had really nailed me in the midst of my out-of-it ramblings on the gospel. Here is my point: write about what is real, don’t let the dagger of truth be blunted by embellished and swollen prose. On the streets it is called “rhetorical bullshit.” In the church, that term is used also—in the mind of the tortured parishioner sitting in a pew, but I suppose the more appropriate term would be “theological sludge.” As Heidi Hill used to say to me, “Unpack what you said, Gary; it’s not clear.” She knew that when I was talking about what I knew I would be clear.
How did you find the publisher for this book? What has your experience with a publisher been like?
A previous book was published by Loyola Press. I approached them on this one and they accepted. My experience with LP was good and always helpful. Fortunately I think I had a copy editor who understood my heart and, like an experienced mid-wife, was able to bring the book to birth in a way that it could live.
What are you working on at the moment?
I am presently between assignments in the Jesuits. I have my sights on serving the refugees of the world in some fashion. I continue to journal, but no corpus of material is “being worked on.”
What are you reading?
Mary Tyler, Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant
Ronald Modras, Ignatian Humanism
Mark Nepo, Facing the Lion, Being the Lion
Ryszard Kapuschinski, The Shadow of the Sun
Pattiann Rogers, Generations
