Distinctly Montana Magazine

69 w w w. d i s t i n c t l y m o n t a n a . c o m This success led to a string of books based on the same character, although Grady is superstitious about keeping track of how many. And for many years, he was content with this career trajectory. But in 2019, Grady paid a visit to his hometown of Shelby, something he does annually, and took a walk in the local cemetery. Standing in that cemetery on a beautiful, quiet day in July, Grady says, "I swear to God, this has never happened to me before. I felt like I was simultaneously hit by a lightning bolt and pulled up in some kind of sucking wind. And I actually heard a voice say, 'All the old ghosts are leaving town.'" Whether you believe in such things or not, there's no denying when you hear Grady tell this story that something happened, and it had a profound effect. "I sort of came to parked in my rental car on Main Street, and I realized I owed it to the people we come from, and to heartland America, especially small-town Montana, to write about our reality." Grady was so inspired by this experience that he has produced a trilogy that is highly autobiographical but because it's fiction, also allowed him to explore a wider range of subject matter. The first novel, The Smoke in Our Eyes, came out in 2024, and the publisher made a bold decision to release the other two novels, Something's Happenin' Here and Tramps Like Us, in a single volume, called American Sky, which will be released in July. "I wanted to capture the reality of what happened here, in a way that Montanans now — whether or not they grew up in it, or wheth- er they came here — that they get a picture of where this great state came from." The storyline for these three novels opens in 1959, when the main character, Lucas Ross, is ten, in fifth grade. Grady says that he probably couldn't have written these books ten years ago. "It might sound strange coming from a senior citi- zen [Grady is now 75], but I think it took a long time for me to get the space, and I don't want to say I needed it for perspective, but I needed that space in order to tell the story honestly. "I had about a dozen people from the Shelby vicinity help me with their stories. And then a couple from Cutbank and a couple from Conrad. But because it was fiction, it allowed me to tell the truth because I didn't need two sources and a document to verify that my friend was discriminated against after surviving polio. I had her testimony." Grady received a lot of pushback from the publisher for trying to step out of his comfort zone. "Oh no, you can just give us another thriller and we can show it to Hollywood, and yadda yadda…" and Grady's response was, "Yeah, later. Right now what's important is telling the truth about America growing up after World War II, in the generation that was barely in high school when JFK got assassinated." Grady also wanted to capture another aspect of small-town Mon- tana that most people might not think about. "When I was growing up, some of the people who founded the towns around us were still alive! So we didn't really start to get a class system in Shelby until I was about fourteen or fifteen. My mom used to say, 'We all know who doesn't have a Sears catalogue for the outhouse, so don't go tryin' any highhattin' on us." I FELT LIKE I WAS SIMULTANEOUSLY HIT BY A LIGHTNING BOLT AND PULLED UP IN SOME KIND OF SUCKING WIND. AND I ACTUALLY HEARD A VOICE SAY, 'ALL THE OLD GHOSTS ARE LEAVING TOWN.'

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