“It was easy to disappear if you were quiet.”

This is the line that hooked me. I lived a quiet life like that for a long time and getting myself to reappear was hard, took a long time, and I have to regularly guard against disappearing again. I’m a forty-five-year-old man and, yes, I very much saw myself in a book about a teenage girl.

I only made one significant edit to Suzy Eynon’s magnificent novel, Terrestrial. The rest was copy editing and proofreading. The original manuscript included the line about disappearing if you were quiet, but it opened differently; I suggested using this as the first line. I like the way it looks now, alone, a line of its own, a quiet standout. In this way it perfectly reflects the book as a whole. Terrestrial is not likely to eat up the bestseller charts, but I think it will quietly stand out. I think most of the people who are lucky enough to come across it are likely to fall in love with it.

In my actual job I am an English teacher. On the last day of class recently we discussed Emily Dickinson’s poem number 1263:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —

Here is the delightful thing about being an English teacher: somehow, although I don’t remember how, our discussion of this poem touched on aliens. I can’t trace back how we got on aliens, but if I had to guess I’d say it was to do with “As Lightning to the Children eased / With explanation kind” because I asked students to imagine they were in 1865, trying to comfort some children who couldn’t go to sleep because they were scared of a storm outside. In every class we discussed different stories (or lies) grownups tell children in order to comfort them. Sometimes thunder is not thunder, it’s the angels going bowling. And lightning is God’s flashlight. And in one section, someone must have had a story that had to do with aliens. I remember saying “But don’t we all feel like an alien sometimes?” And a student saying, “I feel like an alien right now” (in a playful way; we were genuinely having fun). Is this my way of saying Dickinson would have loved Terrestrial? Partly, yes. I bet she would have. But also, just now I was looking at some Goodreads reviews of the book and ran across this: “This is a beguiling little novella that is ostensibly about aliens and UFOs, but asks the question: aren't we all aliens to one another?”

As publisher/editor guy of Malarkey, I want to acknowledge that I did not do a good job on the release of this book. I love being a teacher more than I ever thought possible. I think it’s the greatest job in the world, but it’s exhausting. And the release of Terrestrial coincided with the ending of a long and tiring and wonderful but, again, tiring school year, and I was worn out. I am still worn out. The book was ready to go; it got into people’s hands, etc. I was just really bad at promoting it. So I want to spend some time today thinking about and promoting it (two hours after starting this newsletter post, I can report back: time well spent!).

If you’ve read this far and are wondering about the connection between aliens and Suzy’s book, this quote from Gabrielle Stecher Woodward’s review in Independent Book Review might clear it up: “Daisy’s inner world is shaped by a constellation of fixations that reveal both her longing for escape and her craving for routine. She becomes absorbed by the idea that her city of Mountain Lake might be a hub for alien activity, seeking reprieve in the possibility that, despite her deepest insecurities at the thought of being perceived, something extraordinary might be paying attention to her when the people around her aren’t.” More from that review: “What makes Terrestrial glow is not the plausibility of extraterrestrial life but rather Eynon’s ability to make legible in a compressed space the teenage experience of feeling suspended between two worlds. By artfully demonstrating how writing is a creative practice capable of stitching those worlds together, Eynon urges us all—no matter where we are personally suspended—to pick up a notebook and get to scribbling.” I am reminded here of one of my favorite things about the print edition—the title page. One of the important objects in the book is the diary of a teenage girl; naturally, we decided it would be cool to have page from a diary as the title page. Suzy got a piece of paper, wrote the title and her name, and freehanded the Malarkey logo, and there it was.

Today I am getting around to reading this interview, conducted by Ivy Grimes. You should read the whole thing but I’m going to share my favorite part:

Could you talk a little more about wanting to remain invisible while also connecting? I relate to what you’re saying!

Maybe I want to be a ghost? Just kidding, I’m terrified of dying. Maybe it’s a desire to be heard but not seen, and that’s where the drive to write comes from, this hope that someone will connect with me through words instead of through the physical “me.”

I think I always thought it was alien of me to sometimes, so often, feel like an alien not only in my environment but in my own skin, but we are more than just our bodies and so maybe it is natural and common to feel uncomfortable in them—and to want to connect with people in avenues that are outside of the “physical ‘me.’” I suspect this is part of why I connected so deeply with this book.

One of my favorite human beings is a man I’ve never met. Christopher Stevenson is a writer and librarian and anarchist. More than that, he’s someone who loves words down to his bones. I knew he would love this book but seeing how much he loves it makes me so happy: “I don’t know how much of Eynon is Daisy, but I do know this: I will treasure this novella forever. I’ve read it multiple times and sometimes out loud so I can hear Eynon’s words roll off my tongue and swim into the air. I love reading passages from this book with my voice, every breath acting as a small prayer before I recite the glorious internal rhythm of Daisy’s consciousness as articulated by Eynon. Somehow even the most mundane moments are precious. Even the moments we’re reading about her struggle with counting calories because the descriptions are so vivid. And as weird and fanciful and moonbatty as all that sounds, it’s that way, because life as a teenage girl really is that hard and we are blessed that Eynon wrote it down for us. And I know that Daisy is just a character, but Eynon makes you care so much that you want Daisy to know that she is way cooler and more special than she knows.”

Some more links worth checking out:

• Megan Nichols talks with Suzy for Variant Literature.

• Frolic Press includes Terrestrial on their Women of Weird list.

• Hugh Blanton reviews Terrestrial for Just Reading Nook.

Now for the important part. Where can you get hold of this book?

The Malarkey store is sold out, but Asterism Books is sitting on the last eight copies of the signed first edition, printed in Minneapolis by Bookmobile. Unless people start begging for it we are unlikely to do a second printing, meaning once these eight copies are gone there are no first editions left.

The print on demand edition is available from all the usual suspects, including:

• Bookshop

• Amazon

• B&N

The ebook is also out there in all the usual places but you can get it from Malarkey for only $5.

Aren’t we all aliens to one another? I began the school year, and I will end this note, with a quote from Terence. With the quote from Terence, the truth of which is affirmed in Terrestrial: “I am human. Nothing that is human is alien to me.”