Getting Greg Boyle’s “Tattoos”….to the Page

As you know, Father Greg Boyle’s wonderful first book “Tattoos on the Heart,” has just been published. This means that, in addition to his quarter century of work with gangs, LA’s most famous priest is now officially a writer.

Those who attend authors’ panels at the LA Times Book Festival always seem to want to know how each writer writes. What is his/ her routine? How long does it take them to writes something? Do they ever get writer’s block? You know, that sort of thing.

Because all writers do have their quirky methods, and all have their ways of jump starting their resistance to the blank page.

So it was for Greg Boyle as well.

My story about Father Greg and his new memoir appears in Wednesday’s LA Times. It deals with, among other things, the lengthy and sometimes circuitous route the tales that wound up in Greg’s book took en route to printed form.

Here are some clips:

For the last 20 years, Father Gregory Boyle has been writing — and not writing — the book that is his newly released memoir, “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion” (Free Press: 220 pp., $25). The difficulty was never a lack of material. For as long as I’ve known him, Boyle has been amassing a stupendously rich cache of stories about the homeboys and homegirls who one way or another found their way to his doorstep.

Boyle was already not writing his book when I met him in the fall of 1990. I’d heard that a Jesuit priest operated some sort of gang ministry out of a small Catholic church located east of the Los Angeles River between the public housing projects of Pico Gardens and Aliso Village.

In the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, when Boyle’s gang work was hitting full-throttle, Pico-Aliso was the home to eight active street gangs and, according to LAPD statistics, had the highest level of gang activity in all of Los Angeles. Since the city was, at the time (and arguably still is), the gang capital of the world, this meant that the mile-square parish where Greg Boyle was pastor had within its borders the most intense level of gang activity on the planet.

Finding work that is a true calling is as mysterious a process as falling in love. There were elements in Boyle’s Irish Catholic background that suggested the priesthood. He’d had, after all, a beloved Jesuit priest uncle. And he went to Jesuit-run Loyola High School during a time when, for idealistic adolescents like Boyle, activist priests such as Daniel Berrigan were beacons of authenticity.

Yet there was nothing particular to suggest that the smart, Hancock Park-raised boy with the triple master’s degrees (masters of divinity, of sacred theology and of English) would find himself radicalized by a year among the poor of Bolivia and come home to run the nation’s best-known gang intervention program, surrogate-fathering the kids whom most of the rest of the culture wanted to lock up and forget.

I was curious about what kind of person would embrace such a maelstrom and got myself assigned a profile of Boyle for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and spent the next six months bungee-corded to his ankle, trying to figure out this priest guy who thought he could make a difference with gangsters.

About halfway through my reporting in 1991, I noticed that what I was witnessing had sprawled beyond what a 10,000-word story could contain. I wanted to write a book. But I needed Boyle’s consent, which was problematic since he’d mentioned that he was working on his own manuscript.

I screwed up my courage and blurted my request. He stared curiously at my distress. “Oh,” he said, “I was really hoping you would ask.” I did not realize until much later that in proposing my book, I had unwittingly given Boyle the excuse he needed to keep not writing his.

Yet, he continued to gather his funny, quirky, redemptive, heartbreaking stories. He told them in homily form in the dozens of jails, camps and juvenile halls where he celebrated mass on Saturday, embedded them in the speeches he gave to raise money for the jobs program that was the precursor for Homeboy Industries (which provides work experience, therapy and the opportunity for once-rival gang members to work side-by-side), unfurled them at panels, hearings and conferences where he tried to convince lawmakers and anyone else who’d listen that the young men and women whom his tales featured were worth much more than the worst things they had ever done and that they should never, ever be thrown away……

Read the rest.

And then, when he’s back in town, do yourself a favor and go to hear him read and speak. (And get the book, of course.)