Sarah Allen-Sutter asked Timothy Jay Smith:

Hi Tim! How did you come up with idea for the story of a gay Syrian refugee in Istanbul, in your upcoming Istanbul Crossing book?

Timothy Jay Smith For the last 20 years, every spring I’ve been going to the same Greek village: Molyvos, on the island of Lesvos. In 2015-2017, Molyvos was ‘ground zero’ for refugees crossing a narrow channel from Turkey. The village of approximately 1500 people had an estimated 500,000 refugees land on a nearby beach in one 12-month period.

My first job after college was in Greece working for a sociological research institute. That was 1972, and I spent over two years there, primarily on the island of Santorini. I fell in love with the country and have returned so often that cumulatively I’ve spent close to seven years of my life there.

Experiencing the refugee crisis inspired me to write a novel about them. Ultimately, though, that novel - Fire of the Island - evolved more into an homage to Greece than a story about the refugees per se. They’re in the story, but more as a backdrop fueling conflicts between the Greek villagers.

The more I thought about it, I realized I could describe every step a refugee took from the moment he or she landed on a Greek beach until settled somewhere in Europe. What I didn’t know was how the refugees actually got on the rafts that brought them from Turkey to Lesvos. So I went to Istanbul, contacted a refugee aid organization, and hired someone to show me Istanbul from the refugees’ perspective. He was a people smuggler himself, and after spending a couple of days with him, I had enough of a story to start Istanbul Crossing -- which is, indeed, a refugee’s story.

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