Gina Nutt:  The narrator in “One Day You Will Lie Here But Then Everything Will” hears from an old friend. The call inspires a kaleidoscopic recollection of their friendship and experiences from their youth. What drew you to these characters?
Eve Cavanagh: This used to be a story about a woman who is granted access to an abandoned house by her friend, a construction manager, who later oversees its demolition. There’d be a kinship between this woman and the house, both emptied of vitality. A few other narrative strands seemed essential, at the time—a cult indoctrination, a wedding with a corpse—but these all fled the page as I wrote. Because at the time, I just missed one friend of mine so much. I don’t think I was capable of writing about anything else.

We got back in touch a few weeks after I finished this piece. I dreamed about her all night, then texted her in the morning. That particular night, she said, she’d been manifesting that I would get back in touch. We exchanged a flurry of texts, reiterated our love. Less than an hour later, I heard that Terrazzo wanted to publish this piece. So while the story is fictional, its central relationship is energized by a friendship which remains mysterious to me.

GN: How did you fine-tune the narrator’s closeness and distance to Clarita and Hugo? In what ways do you see these relationships flavoring how she sees and knows herself?
EC: I imagined the narrator as someone who is so estranged from herself that you can only access her indirectly. I’m not sure what readers will take away from the story, but I envisioned Hugo and Clarita as two poles that the narrator is torn between. They’re avenues of access. I think I’d get rid of them both if I wrote this story again—curious to see what would happen if I blocked off all the roads?

GN: I’m also wondering about your work on the line level because there’s such graceful, poetic lyricism here. How are you thinking about image, energy, and sound in your writing?
EC: The atmosphere of a piece is usually the first element to reveal itself to me. It’s kind of like a portal to everything else. Not that plot and characters are necessarily secondary, but it’s easier to see their outlines once I’ve filled the negative space. The process feels more like discovery than total fabrication. I’m often shocked to find the shape that I’ve been writing around, which tends to be more frightening than anything I’d directly approach. There’s usually a moment where I’m like, ohhh… that’s what this story is about… And hopefully I’ve tricked myself into confronting something difficult but true.

Beyond that, I have a lot of fun translating images into words. I try to pin them to the page exactly as they appear in my head, but I’m not a skilled enough writer to do that. So inevitably, the image mutates according to the limits of my ability, it becomes something I hadn’t previously known. Again, I’m just chasing discovery. I only like to write when it makes me feel surprised.

GN: What’s in your creative mosaic? Books, music, restaurants, films, visual art, fashion, ephemera, architecture, anything that energizes your writing.
EC: Some recent obsessions: the 2025 MLB World Series, where my home team played, and thousands of people put their hearts on the line; Shūji Terayama’s nightmarish carnival in Pastoral: To Die in the Country; the spectral geographies of Jason Molina’s midwest; the simultaneity of love and decay in Blake Butler’s Scorch Atlas. I’d been reading stories by Anna Kavan when I wrote this piece, and named “Clarita” after an enigmatic character who recurs in some of her works. I’m just so taken with Kavan’s world, its chilled sensuality and abject loneliness. I love how she tempts us towards this mad, nocturnal trance, and think of her often, especially when I write at night.