Why Montana?
People ask me this more than you'd think.
Why Montana? You're a Texas girl. Gulf Coast born and Gulf Coast settled. What does a woman like you know about mountains and cold and wide open spaces that swallow you whole?
More than you'd think.
It started with Anya.
When I was building her world — the place she runs to, the place that becomes her sanctuary — I needed somewhere that felt genuinely unreachable. Not just physically far, but psychologically far. A place where the noise of everything that hurt her couldn't follow easily. Where the landscape itself felt like permission to breathe.
Montana did that.
Big sky country. The kind of place where you can stand outside and feel genuinely small in a way that's actually comforting rather than terrifying. Where the silence isn't absence — it's presence. Where a cabin in the trees doesn't feel like hiding. It feels like choosing yourself.
Anya needed to choose herself. Montana let her do that.
The HideAway isn't just a place in the book.
It's a feeling. That specific exhale that happens when you finally get somewhere safe enough to put down what you've been carrying. Most of us know that feeling — or we've been looking for it our whole lives.
I think that's why the setting matters so much. Because readers don't just visit Montana with Anya. They exhale with her.
That was always the point.
Where is your Montana?
Everybody has one — real or imagined. The place that means safety. The place that means you made it.
Mine is here, actually. The Gulf Coast. The water. Early morning on the bay before anything has gone wrong yet.
Where's yours? I'd genuinely love to know. Drop me a line: Irish@irish-rivers.com
Irish Rivers writes memoir, literary fiction, dark fantasy, and romance fantasy from the Gulf Coast of Texas. The HideAway is available now. Her memoir, Probably Nothing: A Beautiful Wreckage, releases April 10, 2026. Find her at irish-rivers.com
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