Peeking into the Writing Life of Author Deesha Philyaw

I’m someone who wants to be emotionally invested in the well-being of fictional characters. I enjoy worrying about them when I’m not reading and pining for them when the book has ended. And usually, I avoid short stories because I struggle to connect with the characters in so few pages. However Deesha Philyaw and her debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, changed my opinion entirely.

Deesha's book contains nine short stories about black women, their sex lives and their varied relationships with the church, examining her tenderly-wrought characters at their most personal levels. She portrays women learning to own their identity, their sexuality, their past, their family, their aspirations. She portrays women who find the divine in unexpected places, from science to the bodies of their lovers. These women have stuck with me long after I turned the final page.  

During our interview, Philyaw shares secrets, her motivation to write, the inspiration for her impactful characters, and why she hopes her readers will question everything.

Off the Shelf (OtS): A very warm welcome to you, Deesha Philyaw! Thank you so much for speaking with me. Before we begin I have to ask, did libraries play a role in your career as a writer? 

Deesha Philyaw (DP): Absolutely. When I was a child, libraries were my wonderland. During the summer, I would spend whole days reading, sitting on the floor of the main branch of the public library in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. Libraries fueled and facilitated my love of books, reading, language, and stories, laying the groundwork for my future career as a writer.

OtS: When did you start writing and what did you start writing about? 

DP: I started writing in 2000 when I was a stay-at-home suburban mom of a toddler who did not nap. Initially, my writing time consisted of 30 minutes a day—something that was just for me. Writing fiction was an escape and entertainment. I wrote about dissatisfied women, because at that time, I was one.

OtS: How did this incredible collection of short stories come to fruition? Did you begin with one or two in mind, was it always a collection of connected ideas, or something else entirely? 

DP: I didn’t think of it as a collection when I was writing the early stories, “Eula” and “Peach Cobbler.” But my agent saw a thread running through what she called my “church lady stories”: Black women, sex, and the Black church. She suggested that I get intentional about building a collection of stories around this thread.

OtS: The women in your stories come from all walks of life and all forms of faith (divine or otherwise). Why did you choose to identify them as church ladies? 

DP: From my earliest days of writing fiction, driven by nostalgia, I mined my memories. And in my memories of growing up in Florida in the 70s and 80s, the women of my youth loomed large -- women inside and outside of the church, all of them influenced and shaped in some way by the church’s teachings and restrictive binaries. 

OtS: Your writing is deeply poetic. One of my favorite scenes in your book describes a neglected daughter watching her mother bake a peach cobbler and positively yearning to be a peach so that her mother might touch her. Amazing! So I was surprised to learn that your first book, Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, is nonfiction. What inspired the switch in genres? 

DP: Practicalities! At the onset of my writing career, I really wanted to be published because I believed that publishing would validate me as a real writer. I was writing fiction that wasn’t very good and submitting it to publications that weren’t a good fit anyway. But then I earned an opportunity to write a column at a parenting-focused site called Literary Mama. My column made me visible to editors elsewhere, including national print publications. So I began writing personal essays and book reviews in the parenting/co-parenting space. I was, and still am, very proud of that writing, but it all felt like a detour from my first love, fiction. With my short story collection, I’m back on the main road of my writing life. That said, I still enjoy writing essays, when the mood strikes.

OtS: I found it incredible that you were able to dig so deeply into these nine women’s psyches in so few pages. I feel like I know them all intimately. How do you create such powerful connections between your readers and your characters? 

DP: I wanted to write about the secrets, the moments, the truths that Black women only speak about among themselves or to no one at all. I wrote the truth about Black women as I know us to be, in all our complexity, pulling us in from the margins to where we belong: in the center of our own lives and stories. And I hoped that in doing so, Black women readers would feel seen and heard in these stories, in these characters. I also believed that readers who are not Black women could find connection points with the stories’ broad themes: grief, loss, longing, mother-daughter relationships, struggling against binaries, and a desire to get free.

OtS: The church of Deesha Philyaw seems to be one of inclusivity, where faith is open to introspection and can be found in unexpected places, like physics and the body of a loved one. What do you hope readers take away from the messages in your collection? 

DP: That a whole world of possibilities belong to them, and the god they have likely been taught to revere and fear is suspiciously small and small-minded. That they should question everything they’ve been taught about that god and all the limiting binaries that come with those teachings. That their deepest longings should not be sources of shame, guilt, or fear.

OtS: 2020 and the first strides of 2021 have required endurance, to say the least. What are some of the best books that keep you going and what’s on your TBR pile? 

DP: The Prophets by Robert Jones; The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton; Milk Blood Heat by Dantiel W. Moniz; Everywhere We Don’t Belong by Gabriel Bump; You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love by Yona Harvey; Honey Is the Knife by Hannah Eko; Hallelujah Science by Kelli Stevens Kane; Chronicling Stankonia by Dr. Regina Bradley; Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue by Adrian Miller; How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones; and Boyz in the Void by G’Ra Asim.

In my TBFinished pile, you'll find The Love Songs of WEB DuBois by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour and In Every Mirror She’s Black by Lola Akinmade Åkerström.

Check out Philyaw’s book recommendations, available through our catalogue. 

Deesha Philyaw is is an American author, columnist, and public speaker. Her debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2020/2021 Story Prize, the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction and a 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Beyond the literary realm, Philyaw’s short story collection is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing. While this collection is Philyaw’s fictional debut, it’s not her first foray into writing. She is the co-author of Co-Parenting 101: Helping Your Kids Thrive in Two Households After Divorce, written in collaboration with her ex-husband. Her work has been listed as Notable in the Best American Essays series, and her writing on race, parenting, gender and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Brevity, Apogee Journal, and elsewhere. Philyaw is also a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow.