We were lucky to catch up with Patrick Smithwick recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Patrick thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

I was finishing up the third book in a trilogy of memoirs and had no idea that I would soon be writing the full memoir, War’s Over, Come Home, A Father’s Search for His Son, Two Tour Marine Veteran of the Iraq War. Meanwhile our son Andrew was back from two tours in Iraq as a Marine and was showing more and more symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome.

The earliest written chapter of War’s Over, Come Home is the second—beginning on January 23, 2017, three days after Trump’s inauguration. Andrew had been going steadily downhill for a couple of years and we hadn’t known where he was. My wife Ansley’s brother Graham lived in Orlando and found him there.

Ansley and I flew down immediately. We searched for three days—every homeless shelter, every corner, every street of Orlando. We learned Andrew had a job working construction and had been living in a homeless shelter.

On the last day, as we were on our way to the airport, we spotted him by a lake. We approached him, tried to open up a conversation. He started walking back to his work site. I followed, talking to him all the way.  He refused to communicate.

When we returned home to Maryland, while it was still fresh, still hot, while I remembered every conversation with a homeless person, every visit to a shelter, every nick and scar on Andrew’s face, not knowing what I would do with it, I wrote it up.

After that, I started writing, letting it rip, fast, no looking back, no editing, leaving it raw—that’s all I had time for—during and after our searches to cities all over. It fit in: I had a stenographer’s pad filled with quick notes as I used to take as a newspaper reporter: who to call, who said they’d seen Andrew, what policeman was helpful, names and places and events and memories and feelings, recorded fast, barely legible, as events unfolded.

I had legal pads on which I wrote longer sections during our searches—while flying, up early at breakfast, driving in the car. I had all this emotion. This ripping, exploding emotion wanting to come out, to express itself. I wanted to cry, to scream, sometimes—to hit something. I wanted to hug and kiss my wife. I wanted to hug and love my son Paddy and daughter Eliza—and I did not want them to be going through all this. Most of all—I wanted Andrew back, safe and clean and well fed. For him to have a bed to sleep in, a sink where he could wash his face and brush his teeth. For him to have friends and relatives to talk to.

At the time I was finishing Racing Time, A Memoir of Love, Loss and Liberation, a celebration of the lives of three great friends, three authentic men, who died suddenly in a six-month period. One of them, Tom Voss, was my best friend since childhood. I was working on this book about grief, how to get through it, and about male love and camaraderie, day after day. I was crying and yearning to be with Tom. Then, we’d suddenly get a call. We’d pack up and off we’d go—San Diego, Seattle, Santa Fe, Albuquerque—immersed in the world of the homeless, of beggars, of men and women with serious mental disorders, of filth and stench and rags and plastic bags and horrible living conditions. No fresh water. No clean clothes. No place to go without passersby staring at you. Disease and danger. People being robbed and killed.

In the early mornings and on the flights home I would free-write on a legal pad what I’d seen, experienced, felt. Then, at home, in the early mornings, before I started work on Racing Time, I’d get all my maps, business cards, stenographer’s pads, legal pads, receipts from meals and hotels, spread everything around me: dive in, total immersion, and write a fast-paced record of what happened, without having the slightest idea of what I would do with it all.

When I arose in the early morning, I’d hop in the shower, and I’d think, Andrew has no shower. I’d imagine him splashing cold water from the Rio Grande on his face.

When I brought a hot cup of coffee up to my wife Ansley, I’d hand it to her, give her a kiss, she’d smile back at me—and I’d be thinking of him: alone, walking to the 7-Eleven alone, no one to talk to, no one to love.

I’d walk out to my writing room in the barn and write: letters to Andrew. Dreams of Andrew. Memories of Andrew. Wishes for Andrew.

Gradually, the notebooks of journal entries, thoughts, hallucinations, dreams, and my channelings of Andrew—imagining where he was, what he was doing—became typed pages in a spiral notebook, 300, 400, 500 pages—and I saw that a book was developing.

January of 2017 – January of 2023 – Six years I worked on writing and editing this book.

It was a difficult book to write. There were stages. First, and by far the most difficult part was living it: getting a phone call, a Facebook posting, flying out to a strange city, arising early in the morning, searching the sidewalks and alleyways, pulling blankets and the hoods of mummy bags back, wondering, worrying, over and over if that was going to be Andrew, and yet—also hoping it would be Andrew.

There was this dichotomy all along—as we approached figures lying on the sidewalk in Seattle, up in the canyon of San Diego, under the bridge and alongside the Rio Grande in Albuquerque–between hoping the figure was Andrew versus hoping it was not Andrew.

In contrast to many, who felt like they were missing Andrew, I was with him, day after day. And I was constantly bleeding myself out, as if a prescribed medieval bleeding. I was sticking that needle in a vein and pulling out the blood. I was purging myself; it was a catharsis.

Once the manuscript was at the publishers, they decided it had to be cut to half of its original length. I had written this as my Ulysses—opening up all the stops, employing verse, often using long Joycean or Faulknerian sentences: this was my portrait, not of Dublin, but of a country gone awry. It had many allusions to the Bible and this was all stripped away. I used animals throughout—the hawk who lives outside my writing room, wolves, vultures, as “objective correlatives,” as T.S. Elliot called them. They were not metaphors; they were something that correlated with Andrew.  They were taken out.

I watched as whole chapters that I’d refined and polished, sweated and cried over, were deleted. This was very difficult. But my editors did a superb job—streamlining the book so you could see the bones, quickening the pace.

Cut from the manuscript were:

• Many channelings—where I put myself inside Andrew, and hiked, and slept, and was stared at, and was hungry, and had paranoid schizophrenic thoughts, weird thoughts about my brother and sister and parents.
• Fun times with Andrew – I could put together a book of these, the positive: skiing, riding, skating, hiking, camping, running cross country, partying – all with Andrew, and the way he mesmerized women! I had some scenes I really like where I showed women just melting in his presence, in his quiet, gentle, soft spoken, mellifluous presence.
• Many details and scenes dealing with the homeless in Seattle, San Diego, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Orlando—the horror and disbelief of witnessing how they live.
• Humor—oh! I had this one scene I just love of Andrew hopping and laughing after he’d teased me for not being Mr. Tough when I’d been zapped by our dog’s new underground “electric fence,” and then—he’d tested it out, was zapped, and hooped and hollered and jumped up and down worse than I had. That whole chapter was taken out. And another, gentle chapter, of my love for Andrew as a small boy, of lying in bed, my arm around him, falling asleep during a snowstorm. So hard to see those chapters jettisoned! I hope to somehow publish them in the future.

I had an extremely emotional chapter set at the height of Covid where I show that I am going a bit bonkers—and that, I am glad, we took out.

I worked hard with the publishers on writing the cutlines for photographs and on placing the photographs on pages in the book that relate to the picture. We went through an intense process of editing and proofreading. And finally—it was time to go to the printer. The book is came out May 16, 2023 and I am working full time promoting it, giving radio and podcast interviews, flying around the country giving readings and signings.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My father, A. P. “Paddy” Smithwick, was a steeplechase jockey–eventually becoming the greatest American steeplechase jockey of all times. I was raised in the world of Thoroughbred racing. We were up at 5:00 every morning and at the track by 6:00, seven days a week. I worked my way through high school and through Johns Hopkins University by exercising Thoroughbreds at racetracks up and down the East Coast and by riding steeplechase races.

This upbringing has been extremely important to me as a writer. I’ve written six books—all of them while holding full time jobs. Looking for the best job that would give me time to write books, I’ve worked as a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, director of publications and public relations at independent schools, English teacher, steeplechase jockey, Chesapeake Bay waterman, and all along I’ve been writing. Much of the writing has been in the early dawn hours before going to my day job and on weekends and during holidays. The old racetrack discipline has served me well.

My books have mainly been about what I love.

Racing My Father, my first memoir, is about growing up alongside my father, going to work with him. It is about my love for my father, my mother and my upbringing in the world of horses.

Flying Change is also about my love of the horse world and riding. In it, I am the father participating in a dangerous sport. I return to race riding at the age of 50. It is about going all-out in middle age–and has inspired many readers to push themselves, and not settle for the easing-back temptations of middle age. It is also a love letter to my three children.

Racing Time is a celebration of male camaraderie. It is a toast to my friendship with three authentic men. And it is about grief. All three died within a six-month period and I gave a eulogy at each of their funerals. It is about my love for them.

This latest book, War’s Over, Come Home, A Father’s Search for His Son, Two Tour Marine Veteran of the Iraq War, was written because of my love of my son Andrew. Andrew’s descent into homelessness is a microcosm of the pandemic of homeless war veterans that is sweeping across our country. I hope this book serves as a call to action for readers to work to improve the lives of our veterans. The book is also opening some doors, helping us to find Andrew. I am learning a great deal every day about post-traumatic stress and about the many programs and treatments to help war veterans move on with their lives as civilian citizens.

There have been lots of unforeseen developments since War’s Over has come out.

I have been having a rewarding and fulfilling experience in a way I had not predicted.

I have been receiving notes and letters of thanks from readers who have experienced tragedy in their families caused by trauma, and drug and alcohol abuse. I’ve learned how many people have gone through either the deaths of loved ones caused by trauma, drugs, or alcohol, or the destruction of the lives of loved ones.

Somehow, reading War’s Over has helped them.

A mother whose son had a terrible traumatic experience at young age, and who later committed suicide due to it, wrote to say the book helped her to better understand his illness and helped her get through the night.

Another mother had been missing her son for years. He has finally returned. War’s Over has helped her understand that he probably suffers from post-traumatic stress and has opened her eyes to the struggle of war veterans who have to work hard to reintegrate into civilian life.

A former student has written, noting that her family has been torn apart by members who have experienced trauma, and the book has given her strength to move on. Still another former student wrote, thanking me for writing the book and bringing attention to the plight of the homeless.  She informed me that she is a nurse whose focus is working to help all veterans assimilate into peacetime society.

A reader of War’s Over posted some positive comments about it on Facebook. I responded with a thank you note; he then explained that the book was especially moving to him as he had lost a son to drugs.

I have met many people at book signings who have a family member or friend that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, returned, remained in the military. Everyone thought he was doing fine. Then one day he committed suicide. They have thanked me for writing War’s Over, given me the details of their friend’s unsuccessful struggle to overcome the nightmares and hallucinations, and discussed possible ways to stop this terrible cycle of twenty-two veterans committing suicide a day.

A veteran of the Vietnam War told me his story at a signing; he’s been dealing with PTSD since his teenage years in the military, when it was undiagnosed, and thanked me for bringing it to the attention of readers.

Thus, I am learning a great deal about this scourge of mental illness—whether caused by warfare or other traumatic events—that is whipping through America, and I am grateful that War’s Over is having a positive effect on readers.

In conclusion, what gives me the greatest satisfaction as a writer is a positive and personal response to my books from my readers. I greatly enjoy hearing that they have read the book in one sitting, or were talking about it at a recent gathering, or that they cried through many of the chapters, or that they will never look at a homeless veteran the same, or that the book has inspired them to go out and do something they would never have done before, or that they finished the last page, turned back to the first and read it all over again. This makes all the hard work worth the effort.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

It was very difficult to find a publisher for War’s Over, Come Home. I worked and worked to get an agent for over a year. I sent out dozens of letters, contacted many people, and could not find an agent or publisher. Finally, I was asked to write the introduction to a book being published by TidePool Press. I wrote the intro. The editor of TidePool sent me a note thanking me and saying he really liked it. Soon—I sent him the manuscript of War’s Over. He was very excited about it and wanted to publish it! We were off and running.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

My daughter Eliza is my marketing and social media manager. Starting a few weeks before the book was available, she starting publishing twice-a-week postings on Instagram and on Facebook. I also hired a publicist, PR by the Book. She began getting me podcast and radio interviews. I did a couple of interviews right off with some well-known personalities. Eliza then posted them on Facebook and Instagram, and put them on my website patricksmithwick.com 

More and more people started watching and listening to the podcasts. Word spread. The Baltimore Sun did a front-page story on War’s Over for Father’s Day. We posted it on social media. Baltimore Magazine is publishing a “Q & A with the Author.”  We will post it on social media.  Others will repost it. We’ve worked to time the postings and the excerpts and photos chosen for them to coincide with important dates on the calendar: Memorial Day, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day—and soon we’ll be pushing to post something powerful for Veterans Day. I also work hard to answer and respond to messages and emails from readers on social media.

Contact Info:

• Website: patricksmithwick.com

Image Credits
Depends on which photos are chosen. eliza sent photos.