I recently took the train from Seattle, Washington to Maricopa, Arizona and back, a 44-hour trip each direction. If that sounds like a long time to get somewhere, well it did feel like a long time, but from the other side of it, I wish I could go back to that in-between state. I haven’t travelled a lot in my life for a few reasons, but I enjoyed that taking the train allowed me so much time to remain between two places. I’d taken the bus long distance before, but not in over a decade. I’m afraid to fly, and while I usually fly anyway once a year to visit my family, this time I felt less able to deal with the fear and thought, what if I just never left the ground, would I still be afraid to travel, to leave? It felt like possibility, like hope, and still does now, to know I can get between my current home and my hometown by myself if I need to, without the trip being shaded by anxiety.

And what an amazing concept, that I can glide along behind the strip malls and warehouses, and along the coast and rivers and fields of the western U.S., seeing burned out cars and leaning palm trees and tiny deer and passing right as two hikers emerged from an otherwise empty-seeming forest, my body inside this hurtling train tube making up time by speeding through the arid desert between Palm Springs and Yuma. When I fly, I’m never fully present, I’m just trying to get through, but this time I was able to get excited before the trip, to plan. I brought books and notebooks but spent most of the trip staring out the window or knitting. I started to write a story about a woman on a train (ahaha).

I had trouble sleeping due to the jolting of the train on the tracks especially in the desert portions, either napping for a few hours or not at all, but it was fine, and I saw the sun rise in Yuma and was so relieved to be close to my destination in Phoenix that I cried. I saw a less-red sunrise near Mount Shasta on the way back to Seattle. I once went to Mount Shasta in a dream, on a train actually and the dream train was stuck on the mountain, so I was scared when I saw this as a location along my real-life train’s route through the mountains in case it was some kind of warning. Then it was beautiful and the sky looked unreal in its beauty. I spent a few days in the desert with my family, in the place I once dreamed of moving away from until I did and then for years regretted leaving, to come to this resting spot of being okay with being between these two places.

On the way home to Seattle, waiting in Union Station in Los Angeles for my next train, I signed the contract for my first book, a novella loosely inspired by the town in Arizona where I grew up, where I had just been. I’d slept zero hours the night before and wandered through the surreal, early morning station with my too-heavy bags, bumping into things and feeling the physical weight of my attempt to control my environment by packing all this stuff that in the end was in the way, not having showered for a couple days, eyes a bit glassy from too much coffee. I knew the contract was coming so it wasn’t a surprise to receive the email that day, but it felt special to me because I had always held L.A. as a sort of end-point, that if I left Arizona I wanted to live in L.A. someday, California being this place that I think a lot of Arizonans, or I won’t speak for anyone but myself here but CA was seen as somewhere you might want to escape to. In reality I moved to other cities. But it was fun to sign the book contract while in L.A., waiting for my train home, my personal waypoint.

A little about the book:

My first book, a novella, will be published by Malarkey Books in May 2026

About Terrestrial:

In Terrestrial, Suzy Eynon’s fiction debut, seventeen-year-old Daisy wishes to escape the small desert town of Mountain Lake where she’s grown up for the “big city,” but the closest city is only suburban Phoenix. She finds a message at her high school and though she’s not certain she’s the intended recipient, she wants to find the sender in hopes of connection. Every message has a sender. Then she starts to see unexplained lights in the desert surrounding the housing subdivision where she lives. A chance encounter during a runaway attempt leaves her more confused about the boundary between real and imagined, seen and unseen, as she questions her assumptions about the town and her location on the physical and metaphorical outskirts of it. Daisy tries to convince others what she’s witnessed—in the sky and at school—in this novella inspired by the Phoenix Lights phenomena of the late 1990s. Terrestrial explores themes of isolation, communication, place, and the desert as both a home and a questionably inhabitable environment.

xoxo