“Coming from Germany, New Orleans seemed like a mess and it was,” Smith says. “I didn’t like it at first.”

But the city grew on her. Smith stayed past her graduate studies at Tulane. She had never planned on staying in New Orleans. Smith admits she could have stayed longer than she did but felt a call to return to her South Georgia roots.

The book that would become “Better Than Jail” began in New Orleans.

Smith researched the behind-the-scene moments of Mardi Gras. She interviewed people and toured facilities to better understand the jails and homeless shelters which are key sites in the novel. And she wrote and wrote and wrote.

In more than 20 years, she wrote an innumerable number of drafts for “Better Than Jail.” She recalls a synopsis of an early draft of the novel attracting a New York agent.

The agent asked Smith to send the first few chapters. The agent returned these chapters with a note stating they weren’t written well enough for publication.

“He was right,” Smith says. She kept working on the novel and her writing.

During the past 20 years, “Better Than Jail” wasn’t Morris Smith’s only project.

She wrote numerous short stories, and published two short-story collections. Morris Smith’s “Spencer Road” is more than a dozen short stories capturing the lives of a Southern family from the 1930s to 1950s. The fictional Spencer family of a father, mother, son and two daughters live in an unnamed South Georgia town which could well be Valdosta of that same time period. Readers witness the Spencer children come of age as they deal with a large cast of the family’s help, friends, neighbors and extended family.

Through these short stories, Smith touches upon hunting, race relations, family relationships, the German POWs who could be found in South Georgia during World War II, love, loss, and more.

Though “Spencer Road” was published a decade ago, it is similar in format to Smith’s “Zambian Text: Stories from Ngambe Mission” released a few years ago. Both books are short-story collection with each story in each volume being strong enough on its own merits to stand alone. In both books, a reader could freely read a story here or there, like with most short-story collection, and still come away with some nugget of insight or a laugh. But it is advisable to read Morris Smith’s short-story collections from cover to cover, straight through, as one would read a novel.

Smith arranges her short stories in something akin to chronological order and, though a reader could pick and choose among these short stories, you will deny yourself the full impact of Smith’s story collections if you do. The stories are arranged like individual episodes of a series, but you need to experience each episode for the series to resonate.

Like “Better Than Jail’s” New Orleans, “Zambian Text” draws upon Smith’s experiences as a missionary in Africa in the 1990s. Many missionaries return from trips with tales of lives and souls saved. Smith’s stories are those of lives and cultures encountered. There are noble purposes behind both the missionaries and the Zambians here, but they are also motivated by human foibles.

She’s also been working on other books.

Valdosta-based publisher Snake Nation Press tentatively plans releasing Smith’s third short-story collection, “Above Ground: Cemetery Stories,” this fall. She has also been writing another novel based on the adventures of an overweight, lying 40-year-old woman.