‘The Story Knows More than We Do’: An Interview with Eva Wyles
by Nicolas Padamsee
Published in 2025 by Influx Press, her debut, Deliverywoman, is a raw and poignant collection, with darkly compelling short stories in which characters are painfully alert to the power dynamics of their interactions and in which scenes of hedonism and revelry are shredded to reveal stark loneliness and longing.
I first met Eva at the Rising Sun pub in Farringdon for a writing workshop set up by my editor and now also play 5-a-side football with her monthly. She has a rare talent for finding the pressure points in friendships and romantic relationships, as well as defamiliarising the everyday, and it was a pleasure to speak to her about her work.
What draws you to the form of the short story?
I love reading them. There’s something about being able to sit down and within a small period of time – maybe I’m waiting for the bus, maybe I’m on the bus – have a small dose of illumination. A good short story makes me feel alive, like I have just jumped into somebody else’s life, and the world feels that much wider and more expansive than what just my own viewpoint could offer me. In contrast, a novel feels like a longer-term companion; it’s the car you borrow for a road trip rather than the quick bike to work.
There is also a sense of play and wonder that writing something of short-story length gives me. I love the freedom they offer me to explore all sorts of ideas without becoming worried about whether they’ll work for a reader, which also allows me to let my guard down sooner. Then if the story winds up as something that’s just for me, or I discover I’m not interested in taking it any further, it’s a lot easier to accept this and put it to the side.
Deliverywoman opens with two epigraphs:
It seemed to me that I had discovered how people in books should be – funny and at the same time sad.
– Natalia Ginzburg, The Little Virtues
‘Of course, I know the details. I just reject your premise,’ the woman said. ‘What premise?’ ‘The premise that there is no love when a person is alone.’
— Hilary Leichter, Terrace Story
What made you choose these lines?
I was sick and lying in bed one day. The book was with a line editor and only a few months out from publication, and I had been stuck with this itchy feeling that it needed something more. I think because each story had grown so individually, I was still trying to fully understand what the sum of its parts were, beyond its overarching themes. In this sickly, somewhat delirious, state I was rereading Terrace Story by Hilary Leichter and came across her quote, and felt as if it unlocked something in my understanding of the collection, but not fully. I tried to pair it with other quotes, but they shifted the meaning away from what I felt I had almost found. The Ginzburg quote surfaced just a few days later, and when I placed the two on a page together, I could feel the key turning. In conversation with one another, I felt they encapsulated what the collection was trying to do: acknowledge some truth in the fact that we are all funny and at the same time sad, as are the characters in Deliverywoman, and that there is still love present when we are alone.
Which story did you write first?
I wrote a very, very different version of ‘Painting Work’ back in 2020. Back then, it was called ‘Stubby’. The only thing the two versions have in common is the setting and a character who is colour-blind.
What got you thinking about the characters or set-up in that story?
The catalyst for that story was an evening community painting class I was taking at Inverlochy School in Wellington, New Zealand, where there was a very happy man in my class who was colour-blind. He said he preferred to paint green things, like trees or grass. My brief acquaintance with him really stuck with me, and I started imagining a world without any colour, which also reminded me of the film Pleasantville. Then I was looking at a garden one day and imagining, as you do, what rich people might do in a world without colour. What if they had to pay to have their gardens artificially painted? And from there the world began to grow and gather details. I’ve always liked this quote by Curtis Sittenfeld: ‘I often know that I’m ready to write a short story when I have two ideas that intersect in a way where I suspect they’ll enrich each other.’ I think that’s what happened here: the man from the painting class and this strange imagined world of artificially coloured gardens met one another, and they gave each other somewhere to go.
How long do you like to live with an idea before putting pen to paper?
Not very long at all. I tend to strike while the iron’s hot and write a very messy first draft that is often missing an ending, then go back through it as though I am investigating someone else’s work. Someone once said to me that the story knows more than we do, and I think this is true. Some people may not agree with this, or have other methods of discovering a story, like macro-planning, but for me it begins with a first draft that allows my subconscious to play as freely as it can.
At what stage did you know you had a collection?
There are two answers here, maybe even three. I knew I was working on a collection because that’s what I had committed to handing in for my MA back in 2021. Then there is the time when I went ‘aha’ because I knew it was no longer trying to be one, it had become one. This was in Eastbourne, at the close of 2023, and I’d taken myself out of London for four days before the Christmas Break to work on the stories. On the final night I put post-it notes on the wall of my accommodation with the title names because I was trying to see them anew, and as a whole. There were seventeen, and though I was feeling really good about most of them, there were four that would not cooperate – they were either too flat or too complicated, and in retrospect, did not belong to Deliverywoman at all. In a freak moment of clarity, I took the post-it notes for those difficult stories off the wall and went ‘oh’ – it didn’t need to be as hard as I thought. There was a big group of teenage boys in the flat below having a party, and I just went to bed, buzzing with this new understanding, until they departed for the Eastbourne bars.
The third time I knew I had a collection was the moment with the epigraphs. The whole journey felt akin to the journey toward a friendship:
1. I want to be friends with that person!
2. Oh, wow, we are friends now. I can’t believe it.
3. I thought I understood them as a friend, but I never did, and now I do.
In some way, most of the stories explore a hunger for human connection, the difficulties of communicating on a deep level – of truly reaching someone – and a fear of how one’s words or actions will be perceived. Do you think there is something unique about these anxieties in our age?
There has to be. I think the human race has always been preoccupied with how to reach other people – otherwise we wouldn’t have language or storytelling – but the anxiety around how our words or actions might be perceived has surely reached new heights. If we go by Dunbar’s number, we should have no more than around 150 acquaintances. With social media, the internet, and urban populations, we have access to far more people than that, and I think the fear of being perceived inaccurately multiplies accordingly.
This is something a lot of the characters are dealing with indirectly. They’re shy or lonely or avoidant. But through the miscommunications and misunderstandings of their everyday lives there are still these seemingly random moments of connection. Loneliness is something I’ve struggled with, even though I think it’s a universal condition and actually very beautiful a lot of the time, if you give it the space and time to be. But it’s taken me a while to come to peace with it – and I’m still doing so. I think a lot of the characters in the book are similarly preoccupied with those questions: Who to love? How do I love them? Am I doing it wrong?
In ‘Mother And’ a woman and her son tune in to a funeral on a laptop and watch in reverent silence. In ‘Familial Reunions’ James (Real James) spends his days playing video games with his door locked and his blackout curtains pulled, ‘actively protesting against the state of the world by refusing to participate in it’ and letting his bedroom become both a sanctuary and a prison. What do digital experiences offer these characters? What do they fail to offer them?
I think this connects very well with your earlier question. We are at an age where almost everything can be accessed digitally: relationships, virtual worlds, funerals. For the nameless mother in ‘Mother And’, I wanted to focus on the human-ness of a funeral, even when it has been moved online, and let the event play out against the strange contrast between the room she is in digitally and the room she is physically in. There is also the relationship she has with her son, who is watching the funeral with her, and the failures of his adolescent understanding of her as someone other than his mother. Then there’s the church, being broadcast over livestream: Mary, the friend who has died, and the cleaner she watches long after the procession has finished and the church has emptied. There is something about the reality of both places, and her isolation in between them. Even when the digital world offers it, I don’t think you can ever truly be in two places at once.
For Real James, it’s more to do with his resentment towards the real world and towards himself, and the full salvation video games offer him. The trouble is — and Real James eventually faces up to this — that I think this kind of salvation can only ever be temporary, because the real world still ticks on even if you refuse to participate in it. I think it’s in this way that his bedroom is both sanctuary and prison: he can avoid everything by being in there, but he also can’t leave, otherwise the real world will come knocking. And the longer you leave the real world for, the harder it is to rejoin. So I think it’s that this digital experience ultimately fails to offer him any true freedom. It’s a temporary escape from a world that is messy and terrible, but there is beauty in it too; he just isn’t ready to face up to it yet.
In ‘So, Sorry’ Emily speculates whether ‘inside everyone there is a small glowing parcel of being that never changes’ — what’s your take?
I think I agree! Or I agree in the hope of such a belief. When I contemplate this, I think of the people in my life that I love, and how in each of them there is a soulful and spirited version of themselves that never fully disappears. It might be covered over by work, or stress, or the long accretions of adulthood, but it’s still there. And I think there is more transparency again as you enter old age. I would like to believe the same is true of greedy politicians too, and that their armour is just demonstrably thick.
The stories take place in petrol stations, mountain chalets, beach houses and pharmacies and crackle with evocative descriptions. What role does setting play in your work? How does it interact with plot and character?
Settings and place are often the first thing I know, and the messy first draft I mentioned before simply explores this very strong image that’s in my head. I’m not sure why it happens in this order — I think writing often begins as a form of escapism for me, and when there’s a setting that fascinates me, that’s a very nice place to escape to. The petrol station you mention was my local station growing up. I spent a lot of time going to and from it to put five dollars’ worth of gas in my car, because that’s all I could afford, and I wanted to be able to get as far as Island Bay or Miramar, where my boyfriend at the time lived, or to my friend Hattie’s house, which was like a second home to me. So it occupied a very melancholy place in my mind, which I think the mood of the story ‘A Little Mess’ embraces. Other stories have less exact connections, but are instead collages: the pharmacy in Deliverywoman is a mash-up of my favourite bookstore, Unity Books, glass shopfront and all, which I’ve overlaid with pharmacy decor and added a bedroom to (in the back).
Characters always come after, and they appear two-dimensional for a few rewrites, until they take on some real form and, hopefully, lead me towards some kind of plot. It’s very rare that I know what is going to happen in a story until much later in the process. I’m sure it would be more efficient to map out the plot and write character studies first, but it never works for me. I like to daydream, and I think there’s something useful in allowing a story to emerge from that kind of wandering – it gives rise to unexpected events, and paints the kind of picture I want to escape into through reading.
Were any of the stories a particular struggle to write?
‘So, Sorry’ was the story I struggled with most. It kept transmogrifying into completely different versions of itself, and it felt impossible to pin down. I think, interestingly, it’s because this story had the least to do with setting. I tried to place the characters in several locations, but it felt untrue to its emotional core, which over time can start to feel a little like you are forcing a friend to be someone they’re not. I put it to the side for nearly two years, and when I returned to it, I was able to see that it wasn’t a story about a young woman on a date, or a story about five girls in High School, but it was about the main character wanting to express regret to an old friend. That clarity led to a more intimate approach, and a letter became the obvious form.
When things aren’t working, and you need inspiration, what are your go-to books?
So many — I love and frequently return to Bug Week by Airini Beautrais, Sons for the Return Home by Albert Wendt, anything by Natalia Ginzburg, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears by Laura van den Berg, and Terrace Story and Temporary by Hilary Leichter. In saying that, I probably prefer to read new books when I’m stuck, because rereading can sometimes make my mind close in on a sentence, whereas a new and unfamiliar story feels like it has some kind of charge or wonder that I can carry into my own work.
How do you decide on the point of view and tense for a story? Were any of the stories altered from, say, first to third person or present to past tense in the editing process? And, if so, why?
I don’t, and it feels like sheer luck if I land on the right point of view or tense in the first draft. Often this happens because the voice of the story is commanding enough — I’m thinking of ‘Good Boy’ — that it simply takes the lead. But more often than not, I go into that first draft blindly exploring, and as a consequence, the majority of the stories spend a great deal of time as versions of themselves that they shouldn’t have been. It’s through the rewrites that some shape and distinction emerge, largely through a simple process of elimination of what’s not working: ‘Oh, it definitely doesn’t want to be first person,’ ‘The voice in that is all wrong,’ and so on. Sometimes I step away from the writing and let it steep for a while, because I’ve gotten too frantic trying to make it wear all sorts of outfits, as I did with ‘So, Sorry’. A few months will pass, and I’ll go, ‘Oh, of course!’ while walking along some random pavement one day.
What was the thinking behind the sequencing — starting with ‘Mother And’ and ending with ‘Deliverywoman’?
I spent a great deal of time deliberating over, and ultimately over-engineering, the order of the stories. Did I want to begin with the smaller, calmer stories and end with the large, bold ones? Did I want to space the more speculative ones apart, with realist ones in between? How do I make sure the end of each story flows into the beginning of the next without feeling too same-samey?
Then, one morning, my flatmate Eliza came in and saw the printed stories I’d laid out on the couch. She reordered them based solely on the story titles. I checked it over, and somehow it worked. That was that. I remember questioning the order with my agent and then my editor, but they agreed it should stay in the order Eliza had chosen. It was one of those weirdly miraculous moments, and I can’t claim any thought behind the sequencing.
What are you working on now?
I’m working on a novel, and some occasional short stories. In keeping with my short story writing process, I wrote a messy first draft of the novel over the winter of 2024–25, based on the loose image of a building. I let the draft sit for probably too long, and am now working on a rewrite. It has already changed significantly, and feels much closer to what the novel wants to be.
Deliverywoman by Eva Wyles is published by Influx Press.