Get ready to take the road trip of a lifetime
When Monique Gray Smith began writing her new novel, Tilly and the Crazy Eights, about a group of Indigenous Elders who embark on the road trip of a lifetime, some of her characters weren’t quite gelling yet.
So the Victoria-based writer, who is of Cree-Lakota-Scottish heritage, packed up her ideas and took them on a journey.
After receiving a grant in 2015 from the First People’s Culture Council, Smith hit the road with her best friend, Kelly Terbasket, following the same southern route she had mapped out for her characters.
“It’s the most fun and joyous project I’ve ever worked on,” says Smith. And once those characters finally came to Smith?
“When I was writing, literally it was like I was watching a screen.”
In the book, a cancer survivor named Sarah — inspired after watching the Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman movie Bucket List — is joined by members of her Stitch ’n Bitch group on a road trip from Vancouver to the Gathering of Nations Pow Wow in Albuquerque, N.M. Tilly, the protagonist from Smith’s award-winning 2014 novel, Tilly: A Story of Hope and Resilience, makes a return appearance in this book as the group’s volunteer bus driver.
Each of the other “Crazy Eights” adds their own personal bucket-list destinations to the itinerary. One wants a stop in glitzy Las Vegas to see where the reality show Pawn Stars is filmed, while another dreams of scattering the ashes of her sister over the majestic red rocks of Sedona, Calif.
There’s even a detour to stand on a corner in Winslow, Ariz. (marked by a flatbed Ford and a statue of the Eagles’ late singer, Glenn Frey.)
On their real-world trip, Smith and Terbasket shared driving duties. One would take the wheel while the other documented the sights and their discussions about Smith’s characters. Even though an unexpected spring snowstorm wrecked their plans for the Pow Wow, Smith says the novel wouldn’t have unfolded without her time on the road with Terbasket, whom she praises as one of the most creative people in her life.
“If I had done that trip with somebody else, I wonder how the essence of the book would have been different. That chokes me up,” Smith says, her voice beginning to crack with emotion.
“I thought about just how precious it is when we write something, who we choose to have in our space. It’s influential.”
Road trips, by design, tend to ratchet up all sorts of feelings. The charming characters in Tilly and the Crazy Eights squabble and make up, they laugh and forgive. One woman, mesmerized by the Vegas sparkle, gets lost in a casino.
A rekindled romance deepens, while Tilly looks for signs to help repair her own broken marriage. But the book also carries an undercurrent of pain and loss, in particular, the story of Sarah and her sister, Annie, both of whom still hold secrets from their time at residential school. Reconciliation and healing are at the heart of all Smith’s creative output and her work as an international speaker. Her own mother spent her early years in an orphanage before being adopted into a non-Indigenous family, and Smith has spent the past two decades nurturing her own connections to her Cree culture.