In Terrestrial, Suzy Eynon renders the Arizona desert as both landscape and signal, a place where loneliness sits just beneath the surface and connection often feels out of reach. Set in the shadow of the Phoenix Lights, the novella follows Daisy, a teenage girl searching for meaning after she discovers a mysterious message that may or may not be meant for her.
Drawing on her own experience growing up in Arizona, Eynon writes adolescence with clarity and restraint, capturing a character who is both reaching outward and turning inward. The result is a work grounded in the textures of 1990s suburban life and attentive to the possibility of something unknown pressing at its edges.
Terrestrial is out now from Malarkey Books. I spoke with Suzy about the book’s origins, memory and place, and her ongoing interest in communication, its failures, and its possibilities.
Megan Nichols: I’d never heard of the Phoenix Lights before reading Terrestrial. How long have you known you wanted to write about them?
Suzy Eynon: Growing up, belief in aliens/UFO subculture was prominent, and definitely prominent in Arizona, so it was in the background of some of my memories. I grew up watching movies like Flight of the Navigator and Fire in the Sky (which is about an Arizona incident!). I started writing about a girl growing up in Phoenix before I intended to include anything about the Phoenix Lights, but I’ve always liked this theme of seeing things, weird things that happen in the desert, and I ended up leaning into Daisy witnessing unexplained things. What’s funny is that I was finishing high school when the Phoenix Lights incident occurred, and I remember joking about the lights when I lived there, but I’m sad now that I didn’t know more at the time. It was a different time, pre-internet, and I didn’t drive yet, so I would only have heard about it on the TV news. Years after, I would drive this north-south route to Phoenix and look up to see the airplanes lining up to land at Sky Harbor, this line of lights, and I always thought about the other lights.
MN: Daisy seems to desperately want connection with people but keeps finding herself unable to reach them. Her isolation reminds me of my own high school experience. What was it like to “go back to high school” in order to write this novella?
SE: Daisy’s experience is similar to my own except mine was largely without mystery. I really wanted there to be mystery or surprise or the possibility that daily life could be interrupted by something otherworldly or outside of the suburb where I lived at that age (I still do), so it was nice to revisit that time period with the benefit of adding in a guiding force, a bit of hope for Daisy.
MN: In your Ivy Grimes interview, you talk about feeling dismissive of Arizona when you lived there as a teen but now you can look back fondly. Did you know you wanted to write a story set there? Do you think there will be more Arizona writing in the future?
SE: I did know I wanted to write a story set in Arizona! I’ve lived in the Seattle area 15+ years now which seems unreal, but I don’t write about Seattle that often. I think Arizona will always feel like home. When I first moved away, I was always calculating the hour back in Arizona from the time zone where I was living at the time, living in the past or the future. I think I still carry this with me, always being aware of this other piece, maybe an alternative reality where I never moved away. I don’t think I’m done with it yet, writing about, inhabiting it. I enjoy being in the world of this narrative I’ve created for Arizona, which is probably a swirl of truth and warped interpretations, lies, rewritings of history including my own. I have another Arizona book in progress, this time with an older protagonist, just so that I can spend more time there mentally.
MN: This story is rich with 90s detail (diet culture, landlines, movies, stores like JCPenney!) and it feels nostalgic, both in a positive and negative sense. What was it like to return to that time period?
SE: It was fun to return to a world where there was no internet access at home and the way to reach someone was by landline or note or showing up at the mall. It feels like that was a time of less connection to the world beyond where I lived, but also a hopeful time, wondering who and what was out there. There was a level of patience and faith to the slow communication we had in the 90s that was hopeful: will my friend send a letter back? Looking back on the diet culture, I remembered doing the cabbage soup diet with my mom, sharing bowls of cabbage water and thinking it was gross but something I had to do. I was reminded of little things that at the time seemed normal.
MN: Food restriction appears repeatedly in Terrestrial. Was this connection between not eating and a desire to diminish or disappear something you were consciously shaping? Did you know early on Daisy would have a complicated relationship to food?
SE: I’m happy you noticed that connection! I didn’t intend in my early drafts for Daisy to have this relationship to food, but food is a topic that I accidentally end up writing about often. It sneaks up on me. I went with it because I thought it made sense that she would want to disappear in multiple ways.
MN: Many of Daisy’s attempts at communication fail. She struggles to express herself, and when she does, others don’t respond in the way she hopes. I was struck by how this parallels the idea of aliens possibly trying to communicate as well but perhaps being unable to fully. How conscious were you of that connection while writing?
SE: I’ve always been obsessed with this idea of messages sent but not received, inconsistencies or mismatches in communication. I have dreams where I have a phone that won’t connect or I can’t physically press the buttons to call someone. I love that you saw that the aliens maybe wanted to send a message. I think it was intentional, that Daisy and the aliens have one-directional communication. The lights did seem like they were blinking for her but she wasn’t sure what it meant.
MN: I loved the close third POV. Because of Daisy’s explicit habit of narrating her life, the story almost felt like first person. I imagined her voice narrating the story. I used to do this a lot as a kid too, I was constantly imagining myself in a Lifetime movie or, if I was in a good mood, VH1’s Behind the Music. How did you land on this voice?
SE: I also did (do!) this! It’s reassuring to hear others did too. Over time I have come to feel comfortable with the background noise in my head. To write in close third POV feels natural to me and is how I usually write fiction. I hoped it would work for Daisy since she had a loud interior life and that fed into her keeping a journal, narrating her life in this way but also distancing herself from those around her. I hoped that the reader would feel close to Daisy, to see how and why she would want to see those lights.
MN: I loved the ending! When did you know how it would end?
SE: Thank you! I’m not a huge planner in my writing so with longer work, I have a notebook with some key points to include but don’t usually know how I will write an ending until I’m nearly there. I wondered how I would end her story because I didn’t want Daisy to get beamed up by aliens or do anything that seemed unrealistic for her like leaving her life completely. I thought, what if she finally has a small amount of control over her own story, what would that look like.
MN: How long did it take you to write Terrestrial?
SE: I’ll say about 3 years to write, 2 more years to edit and reimagine and have accepted for publication. It started as “My Arizona Book” with too many threads, so I removed some that weren’t going anywhere. I wrote some of it as a final project for an online MFA I completed in 2022. I would say that I’m a slower writer or that I carry things around in my head for years before they end up in my work. Some of what became the novella I thought about for years because I always intended to write an “Arizona book.”
MN: Were there any books, stories, poems, or movies that influenced Terrestrial?
SE: Oh yes! The Lost Boys (movie), which I’ve been obsessed with since I was a teenager because the family moved to the vampire town from Phoenix, and to me was a call to adventure. Books I read as I wrote or are part of my psyche: Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson which is a beautiful book about growing up and about art; Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine; Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet (desert); I Love You But I’ve Chosen Darkness by Claire Vaye Watkins (desert); Death Valley by Melissa Broder; The Last Days of California by Mary Miller.
MN: You mentioned you’re writing another book set in Arizona. Are you willing to share a little more about that project?
SE: My new project has also been reimagined a few times. I kept writing the same story about working in a grocery store and decided I wanted to spend more time in that world. It was less fictional. In its current form, it’s fiction with themes of work and home and what happens when the lines blur.
MN: How has your experience as Variant’s Managing Editor of Long Form Fiction influenced your writing, if at all?
SE: Reading and editing short stories for Variant reminds me of the magic that makes a story work, the skill in pulling different threads together, going deep, then tying it all up in 15 pages. I think short stories are important and can communicate so much. It makes me want to keep trying to write them.
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Suzy Eynon is the author of Terrestrial from Malarkey Books. She’s also the author of the prose chapbooks Commuting (Ghost City Press summer series 2024) and Being Seen (Ethel Press August 2025). Her work has been published in Roanoke Review, Passages North, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Her short story collection was shortlisted by YesYes Books for fiction in 2023. Currently, she is the managing long form fiction editor at Variant Lit. She grew up in Arizona and lives in the Pacific Northwest.
