When Maile Meloy was growing up in Helena there were few outward hints of her future as a critically acclaimed author — she didn’t lug pen and pad with her through childhood.

But there were other signs.

“She was an incredibly observant and bright young person,” recalls her aunt Kay Satre, a Carroll College professor of English. “And she had a memory that was just remarkable.”

Meloy is the keynote speaker at 7:30 p.m. tonight in Carroll College’s Campus Center for the college’s 7th Annual Literary Festival.

Meloy didn’t try fiction writing until she was a senior at Harvard University, she said earlier this week in an e-mail interview from her home in Los Angeles. She took a beginning fiction class with Richard Ford and loved it.

“After I graduated, I had a nearly unpaid job working for my uncle Mark at the BLM as a river ranger in Utah,” she said.

She’d work nine days on the river and then have five days off, staying with Mark and his wife Ellen, a writer, in Kenilworth. While there, Meloy was writing stories, which she kept to herself.

“Ellen, who died in 2004, was really inspiring — she was such a funny and thoughtful writer. ... She made it seem possible to make writing a career.”

In the meantime, Meloy had a lot of other jobs — working on a ballot issue in Montana, teaching English in Costa Rica, cashiering at the Real Food Store and then heading to California, where she was a development assistant in animation at Disney Studio in L.A.

She would finish her stories as a graduate student in the MFA program at the University of California, Irvine. They became her first book, “Half in Love.”

“That’s where I started taking writing seriously, and admitting to myself and occasionally to other people, that it was what I wanted to do.”

Early influences on her writing career were Helena High teachers David Cooper and De Winterburn and Carroll’s Satre, whose writing class  Meloy took as a Helena High senior.

“I also think that taking acting classes at Grandstreet and at Carroll helped  — I think you learn a lot from studying acting about what happens in dialogue to make a scene interesting.”

Critics have praised Meloy’s lean writing, which captures in a few words a gesture, a character, a life.

“Meloy is fearless in the sweep of her attentions, commanding the manners, idioms and fundaments of a range of cultures, regions and classes,” writes author Geoffrey Wolff. “Trust this audacious new writer. She is a wonder.”

While Meloy’s portraits of Montana characters resonate, so do her stories of such people as a soldier who is being shipped to France during World War II.

In an interview with the L.A. Times in August, she said, “To know someone, you don’t look at clothes or carriage, but at the purpose of the life.

“The question of what they’re living for is the central one for me. Even if they aren’t really sure — then that dilemma is the central one. If what’s really important to people is on the line, then I think you have a good story.”

Meloy quickly discarded the advice often given to young writers: Write only what you know.

“I think you have to find some emotional connection to whatever you’re writing, in order to make it feel like it matters. But at this point, if I wrote only what I know, it would be about someone who sits in a corner of the room at a funny-looking desk ... staring at a screen. It would be insanely boring.”

Meloy’s own story rarely appears. She’s the daughter of Claudia Montagne and Mike Meloy and grew up in Helena.

Her brother, Colin, also took to writing — in a much different Baroque style — and is singer/ songwriter, and founding member of the folk-rock group the Decemberists.

Her grandfather Pete was a potter, who joined Archie Bray in launching the Archie Bray Foundation. Pete’s brother, Hank, was a painter who taught art at Columbia University in New York.

So it’s no surprise that Meloy’s family appreciated and nurtured art.

However, they weren’t sure it was something to choose as a career, she said in the L.A. Times interview. “I think it made them anxious as a profession. There was a while when my dad was like, ‘Will one of my children please get a job?’”

The best writing advice she ever received came in graduate school from writer Aimee Bender.

“She wrote for two hours, first thing in the morning, six days a week,” recalled Meloy. At that time Meloy had “college habits” and wrote when she had deadlines, but otherwise had “all these stories started, and none of them were due.”

Meloy took Bender’s advice to heart, finding “it really worked.”