Syl Jones, provocative opinion writer and pioneer in narrative medicine, dies at 72

Stories were everything to Syl Jones, and he used them not only to make sense of this world but to dream new ones.

A provocative playwright, contrarian opinion columnist and evangelical pioneer in the field of narrative medicine — where doctors and nurses improve outcomes by understanding and treating the whole person, not just their isolated symptoms — Jones died Nov. 10 at Sholom Home West in St. Louis Park. He was 72.

He went into hospice after a catastrophic stroke on Aug. 27, 2020, a day when he was slated to teach doctors and nurses at Hennepin Healthcare, according to his son McGraw Jones.

If there’s a comfort to his last days, it’s that he had a sense of what the end might look like from his work in health care and theater, said Mixed Blood Theatre founder Jack Reuler, who hired Jones as a playwright in residence for more than a decade.

Jones led workshops and wrote plays to teach doctors to better know themselves as carriers of trauma and stress, and to better comprehend their patients.

“Without a doubt, Syl left the world better than he found it,” Reuler said.

To the public, he’s best known for his writings onstage and in newspapers including the Minnesota Star Tribune and the Minneapolis Spokesman-Recorder, where he wrote prickly opinion pieces on social, cultural and political topics for decades.

His plays championed underdogs and included “Black No More,” an adaptation of George Schuyler’s classic science fiction novel about an invention that turns Black people white, thereby eliminating the rationale for racism. The satire premiered in 1998 at the Guthrie Theater before traveling to Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.

“Black No More” capped a stretch in the 1990s when Jones had plays premiere once a year for seven years at different theaters in the Twin Cities, Reuler said. “That’s a feat that probably no one can claim, and he did it with panache.”

But Jones’ most immediate impact might be in narrative medicine, where practices he started live on and for which he won a prestigious Bush Fellowship.

Dr. Jon Pryor, CEO of Hennepin Healthcare from 2013-2019, saw Jones give a talk in Edina in 2014 about how to improve care and was so taken with his vision and passion that he hired Jones onto the senior leadership team of Hennepin Healthcare.

“He was talking about how various forms of communication helped to understand the traumas you encounter and carry as a provider and also helped you understand your patients better,” Pryor said. “Without a doubt, Syl made Hennepin Healthcare a more responsive, effective and better organization. Every organization deserves their own Syl Jones.”

The comprehension and healing power of stories was something Jones knew from experience. The first child of electrician Sylvester Jones Sr. and burn trauma nurse Juanita Jones, Syl Jones grew up in the 1950s and ‘60s, when Cincinnati was wracked by segregation and racial strife.

Jones was sexually assaulted as a youngster, an episode he recounts in his semiautobiographical young adult book, “Rescuing Little Roundhead.”

“I loved listening to him tell stories about growing up and surviving in that time,” McGraw Jones said. “They were sometimes tragic and marked by poverty, but they were always full of laughter and love.”

Whip-smart and gregarious, Jones came to Minnesota to attend Augsburg University, where he studied theater, literature and film. He never left, making a writing life that also included more than 100 illustrative training plays for the public and private sectors.

Jones was a workaholic who married and divorced four times.

“He was good at many things, but not marriage,” McGraw Jones said.

A film and music aficionado, he would write while listening to jazz, especially the music of Miles Davis. It was one of Jones’ stories that made Reuler seek him out.

In 1980, Playboy hired Jones to write a profile on William Shockley, a Stanford professor who won a Nobel Prize for co-inventing the transistor. Considered the father of the computer age, Shockley was an ardent racist who spent much of his life trying to prove that Black people were genetically inferior to whites.

After Jones interviewed Shockley on the phone for his feature, he and a photographer flew out to California to see their subject in person.

“Shockley greeted the white photographer enthusiastically as Mr. Jones and didn’t realize that Syl was Black,” Reuler said. “But Syl wrote this beautiful evenhanded story about it. I bought Playboy to read that article, contacted Syl, and he became my best friend for the last 40 years.”

Jones is preceded in death by his parents and by siblings Angela Hutchinson and Terry Jones. Besides son McGraw Jones, of Hopkins, survivors include daughters Dresden Jones of New Hope, Channing Jones of Brooklyn Center and Evan Jones of Austin, Texas. He is also survived by siblings Susan Mars of Aiken, S.C., Gail Lee and Michael Jones of Cincinnati, and several grandchildren.

Services are pending.

Jones was a devout Jehovah’s Witness, and his faith helped him to deal with trauma and also put a lid on tooting his own horn, Reuler said.

“The thing about Syl was that he was this brilliant, multifaceted genius who lived unassumingly among us,” Reuler said. “He didn’t want to call too much attention to himself, but that, too, was classic Syl.”