This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:02] DEESHA PHILYAW: Ladies and gentlemen, we invite your apprehensive listening.

[0:05] DEESHA PHILYAW: How would you define the term breakthrough for yourself? Finishing that novel. That will be my breakthrough. And this is why I like this question. So the process of editing, I love it. To me, that's where the magic happens. That's the real writing. Working with somebody who has great insights and who can help you be clearer and tighter and smarter. Yes, yes. But I was not at all interested in imagining my stories through a white gaze and editing for that. I wasn't gonna do it. And thankfully I wasn't asked to do it. And how would you define the term breakthrough? I want to finish a project and I want to someday be able to just write. Those are the ways that I feel like I can say I've had breakthroughs.

[0:49] DEESHA PHILYAW: Hello. I'm DEESHA PHILYAW, author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, and you're listening to the Afro-Existential Podcast on the Broadway Podcast Network.

[0:59] Indira G. Wilson: To me, that's where the magic happens. Welcome to the Afro-Existential Podcast, a podcast and audio play in one. I am one of your hosts, Indira Wilson.

[1:11] Blaine Teamer: And I'm Blaine Teamer. They're a wild lot, they say. This season we'll be presenting a brand new audio play entitled Pandora's Trunk and a new interview series entitled The Breakthrough from Vision to Fruition. In this series, we hear from people who took a great idea and made it a reality. We want to know how they did it and how they got over the obstacles along the way. We hope that it helps and inspires you to make your great idea a reality.

[1:36] Indira G. Wilson: But before we go to commercial, here is a sneak peek of our next audio play, Pandora's Trunk. Pandora Washington is on a quest to find her birth mother. In this scene, she meets Sister Rosemary, who tries to explain to Pandora how she was seduced by the new minister of the first and last most faithful harvest and grains at Evanathy Church.

[2:01] Sister Rosemary: We shall begin now. Matthew 15:11 says, it's not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth. This defiles a person. Matthew 15:11. That what it do say. He ain't lying. He ain't lied because that's what it does say. Then Pandora girlfriend, but he didn't like he did eat. He wanted me to taste his fruit. He wanted me to taste his fruit. Let me say it one more time. And it was a strange fruit. Oh, was it a mango or a tangelo? Were it like no mango or no tangelo? As far as I know. Lo! I did go. I said it was a strange fruit. And I was it like a kumquat or a papaya. And what? Like a kumquat. Was it not? And I would be a liar if I said it was like a me and oh my. And can I get an Amen? If it weren't like no persimmon, can I tell you one more game? That's the kind of fruit you wanna have at night. In the afternoon as a flag. Yes, no.

[3:48] Indira G. Wilson: And we'll be right back after a brief commercial break.

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[4:51] Blaine Teamer: Oh hello, and welcome back to the Afro Existential Podcast and our special interview series entitled The Breakthrough from Vision to Fruition. I am Blaine Teamer, and I'm here with my co-host today, Frederick Johnson, and our special guest, author DEESHA PHILYAW. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies won the 2021 Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies focuses on black women, sex, and the black church, and is being adapted for television by HBO Max with Tessa Thompson executive producing.

[5:56] Blaine Teamer: What we realize is that everybody has a different definition of what a breakthrough is for them. And so when you think of the word breakthrough for yourself, how do you define that?

[6:06] DEESHA PHILYAW: Sure. So as a writer, I have I've sort of seen it in two ways. First was I want to finish something and get it published. And that something initially was a novel. There are three novels that I've started over the span of the last 20 years. And the first two I didn't finish. The third one, I got about two-thirds of the way done and stalled. And it was like I just want to finish. I just want to finish. And so I think if you had asked me five, 10 years ago, even I would have said finishing that novel. Finishing that will be my breakthrough if I can, if I can just finish it. And then I also I think without thinking of it as a breakthrough, but I think based on your definition, I've always wanted to be able to make a living writing.

And that's been a journey as well. Doing what I call a patchwork quilt of income. You're teaching, you're editing, you're coaching, you're taking contract jobs to cobble together enough money to pay your bills. And then you're kind of like buying time to do that book project. So I was like, I want to finish a project and I want to someday be able to just write. Those are the ways that I feel like I can say I've had breakthroughs.

[7:25] DEESHA PHILYAW: What was happening internally where you're like, no, I'm gonna get this done by the end of this date? As often there's a detour. So I was, you know, novel, novel, novel. I wanna, you know, this is this novel that I want to write. But while I was trying to get published and build a career, I was chasing any opportunity, including nonfiction, which was not, you know, I think of like fiction as my first writing urge. There were more opportunities I found for nonfiction. And so I took this long, years-long detour into writing about parenting, personal essay writing, and then ended up writing my first book is actually a book on co-parenting with my ex-husband. It's a nonfiction book. And so technically based on my original definition of a breakthrough, I broke through, but it was like wait revise, you know, okay, so it's not a book.

So I wrote, I finished a book, I got a book published, but it wasn't the book of my heart, you know, it wasn't and I wasn't yet able to say I make my living writing. I don't have to have these other like 50 11 jobs to pay the bills. So that was sort of the first time around. One thing I learned from that process because I'm very proud of that book was that in the commercial publishing world like you, you know, unless you can self-publish and then you control everything, but with traditional publishing, there has to also be the marketing support that goes with the book. And either your publisher has to do it or you've got to have the money to hire a publicist and hire marketing people. And I didn't have that.

And that was for the first book. That was for the co-parenting book. So then with this book, I was actually working a corporate job at the time when I got the deal. And so I was like, for this book, I wanted to have every chance of being successful. So I think I moved the goalpost from just finishing to actually getting it, you know, getting it published, which I had already done, to I want people to read it. Right. You know, I wanted to have every chance of success. And in this world, that means it has to be marketed, it has to be promoted. So I was like, let me try and save some coins to hire, you know, my own publicist or something, because I don't know, you know, it's a university press, and I don't know what they're going to be able to do.

My advance for Church Ladies was smaller than the advance for my nonfiction book. So I really was not anticipating that the press would be able to do much. So I was like, I gotta figure out a way. And I was researching publicists and seeing how much it would cost, and you know, trying to figure out like what can I sell? Right. And was the publicist, was the publicist more than the advance? Oh, yeah. The publicist, you know, was a lot more. And you pay them a stack of money, and it's like this is for three months. And then if you want them to keep going, it's another stack of money. But thankfully, West Virginia University Press not only saw potential in the book itself and gave me a book deal to publish it.

[10:32] DEESHA PHILYAW: They also invested in a publicist. They have an in-house marketing team, but then they also hired a third-party publicist who is still looking out for me today, you know. Um, you know, so people still contact him, his name is still on my website, and you know, he pushes things my way. But that made a huge difference that made it possible for the breakthrough on in that regard. I'm going through a similar process right now where I have the book contract, and you go through all this stuff to get to that point where you're like, Oh my god, I'm so excited. And then you see what the advance is. And then you're like, and then so then it's like, wow, you have to get the publicist and the marketing, all those other things. And so many people don't know that piece, right?

[11:20] DEESHA PHILYAW: Right. So they assume you got published, you're good to go. It's just everything is just gonna roll out and everything's gonna be fine. And there's a whole machine that is going to get your book into different people's in all different kinds of ways, you know. And hopefully the advance can help with that, but it's so expensive for like a publicist. And it's like you said, it's only for a certain amount of time, and you know, that builds momentum, and then, uh, okay. Do I put some—it's like Vegas, right? Once you start putting those coins in.

[11:52] DEESHA PHILYAW: Exactly. I mean, my advance would have gotten me not even a month's worth of a good publicist's time, like not even, and you can't really do much in a month. And so, you know, you were asking like how I was feeling. Once I heard that they had hired a publicist, then I got excited all over again because I was like, okay, this book could have a chance to actually be read. You know, my co-parenting book, so it made its advance, it earned out, and I still get a little royalty check every quarter. So people are reading the book, and I heard from people saying thank you for the book, but I knew that there was a lot more potential there, especially with like 50% of people getting divorced. Like there, you know, it was a huge market that I don't think got into. So, you know, for this when I was like, okay, this book is going to have a fighting chance. And that's all I wanted. You know, I was not feeling entitled to anything else.

[12:49] DEESHA PHILYAW: I would always kind of marvel and just be like a little stunned when I would hear from other writers who I saw as successful because they had published, right? You know, so you got three books. And they were like, but I didn't make this list and I didn't get this award. And I was like, oh, okay. So, you know, like you said, everybody has a different definition. I think it's rare that we have these conversations about the process.

[13:15] DEESHA PHILYAW: Yes. Right. And so we don't know as you go into it, like, do I need to ask to be put into these competitions? How much of investment are they putting into their white male authors? Right. Or their white female authors. Like how much of the budget, this limited budget is going to those particular things. Like we don't even or we—and we don't even know what we're doing. We don't know what we don't know. We don't know if we don't know. If we've struggled and scraped to get to that particular point, right. And sometimes we're so happy to be there that we don't think we can ask questions. We don't think we can push back.

[13:47] DEESHA PHILYAW: And, uh, Clint Smith would—I just, uh, heard an interview, watched IG Live that he did, and you know, his book was on the New York Times bestseller list, and he wanted people to understand that, you know, it's not a pure quality of a book. There's a lot that goes into a book ending up on the bestseller list, and it's not—and it's sometimes it's dollars that the publisher pushes, you know, marketing, but sending it to the right people, the, you know, reviewers, and which book are they championing and which competitions, all of those things are, you know, you know, they can decide early on. This is, you know, we've got finite resources, including people resources. This is who we're gonna put our weight behind this scene.

[14:30] DEESHA PHILYAW: Right, right. Because of the nature of this book, did they feel like they needed to get maybe a particular type of publicist? If this was maybe different than what they've been publishing before, would that play a part at all?

[14:41] DEESHA PHILYAW: I can tell you that the publicist that I have, he's not, you know, he's not black, so it's not like he had that particular cultural, you know, competency that, you know, a black publicist would have, but he's excellent at what he does. So I'm guessing it was because my book was the lead book, and they did with me what they did do with every author. You fill out this what they call the author to author questionnaire, right? And then so I gave them a lot of information as well.

[15:10] DEESHA PHILYAW: Right, right. How did you get connected with West Virginia University Press?

[15:15] DEESHA PHILYAW: I have on my black and Appalachia shirt. Um, Pittsburgh is part of Appalachia, and West Virginia University Press is a regional press. And so, uh, head of the press actually lives in Pittsburgh now. I don't know if he did several years ago. Um, but he connected with my agent, and I don't know, probably maybe they were just at a conference or just knowing each other, being in the region together. And while I was working on my collection before we sent it out, my agent had coffee with him just to, you know, like a get to know you type of thing. And she mentioned what I was working on, and he said, Oh, you know, that would be something I would be interested in taking a look at. And so that, you know, the interest was sparked there.

[15:56] DEESHA PHILYAW: And then so when we had, uh, we went out with a partial manuscript, and he was, you know, the, uh, West Virginia was among the publishers that we sent it out to, and they are the only offer that I got. Everybody else rejected it.

[16:11] DEESHA PHILYAW: Wow, that's the only one you needed, yeah.

[16:14] DEESHA PHILYAW: Right. Yep. So how did this book come about and how long did it take you to write it?

[16:22] DEESHA PHILYAW: The nine stories. Yeah, so at this point, what is it, 2022? The oldest story in the collection is probably seven years old at this point. But you know, I had mentioned that I was writing a novel that I started in 2007. The main character of that novel is a church lady, she's actually a first lady, the pastor's wife of a mega church. So I had that novel, but then I stalled, but I started working on these short stories, and um, I was reading them at different events, and my agent is also local, and she would, you know, had heard me read some of these stories, and so she said, you know, while you're on hiatus from the novel, you know, maybe you could build a collection around these church lady stories, and so she was the first to use that phrase. I wasn't really thinking of them that way.

[17:07] DEESHA PHILYAW: I didn't because I only had like two at the time, but she saw the connections there, and so she encouraged me to get intentional about writing stories that centered around the theme of black women's sex in the black church, which is pretty broad, and not that building a collection is easy, but certainly I felt like I could do that. It felt more possible than finish this novel that I had just been dragging around at this point almost a decade. And she also was very specific in that once I got three stories published, she felt that we could go to market with a partial manuscript, and that felt tangible and it felt possible. And, you know, it gave me a clear assignment, whereas finish the novel just felt overwhelming.

[17:51] DEESHA PHILYAW: I got going and started writing and submitting, and while things were out, I was writing some more. And so it was in that mix that she had the conversation with him. So by the time we submitted up the partial manuscript, I actually had six stories in it.

[18:07] Indira G. Wilson: You said three of the stories had been published. Were they like in different anthologies and different—

[18:11] DEESHA PHILYAW: Not anthologies? Um, Apogee Journal, um, Baltimore Review, and the Cheat River Review were the first, uh, were the places that published the three of the stories from the collection before it became a collection. But going from that such a broad theme, how did you kind of drill down from that theme?

[18:31] DEESHA PHILYAW: So I had some stories that I had started before I knew I was building a collection. I was always working on something. And if I started, sometimes it's 20 pages, sometimes it's a sentence, sometimes, you know, it's a line of dialogue that I hear that I come back and develop it. And so I had all of these, uh, you know, like story possibilities, and I revisited them through a lens of that thing, black women's sex in the black church. When I sat down with my agent, and she's now what I she what I now know is an editorial agent, so she doesn't just get the deals, but she also, um, she was an editor before she was an agent, and so she edits my work as well before I send it out into the world.

[18:47] DEESHA PHILYAW: And so I had a couple dozen possibilities, and I just laid them all out, and some of them didn't even have titles, and I just tried to describe them in one sentence, you know, what I thought the story was gonna be. So she and I kind of went through those and narrowed it down to maybe like 12 or 15. And I know myself, which is I would have obsessed forever over which other stories. Um, and this is after I got the book deal to, you know, to, you know, I knew what I needed to do. I needed to keep writing. I would have like, well, which is the perfect story and which is the best. And I would have worried myself until I was paralyzed.

[19:54] DEESHA PHILYAW: So I took 12 of those stories and I reached out to like maybe six friends of mine, um, some of whom, you know, read my work before I send it out, and others just people who I thought had good eyes and good ears. And I said, which of these stories, your top five? Tell me your top five. After I heard back from everybody, five stories kind of got the most votes, and I was like, that's it. These are the stories I'm gonna write. And so what West Virginia did was they didn't tell me how many more stories to add. They just said, we want a collection of about 35,000 words, and so I had the six stories. I took one of those stories out because I felt like it wasn't a great fit. I also didn't feel like it was a particularly strong story, and I also wasn't interested at that point in going back and working with them.

So I pulled it out, so I had five stories and then, uh, in the collection already, and then I just started writing through my top five until I hit that 35,000 mark. So it wasn't very scientific. I can't say. And the stories that were added, you know, what they accomplished was multiple generations, you know, they're intergenerational stories.

[21:04] DEESHA PHILYAW: There's some stories that are really heavy, and then others that also have some humor. I got to play with form, and so I tried not to think about is this redundant or is this cohesive? I just tried to look at the stories before me and just fall into them and just see, you know, well, what's possible? Story like uh when Eddie Levert comes, initially that was a story about what happens when a parent who wasn't a particularly good parent to you, you've now got to take care of them. So there also wasn't a lot of anything around the church initially in that story. But when it was time to build the collection, I had the mother have a conversion experience. So there's, you know, the mother before she became a Christian and the mother afterwards, and that became a big part of the story.

What I enjoyed about that story and felt like I knew that person. She had the conversion experience, but it's like it didn't translate into a certain type of unconditional love or kindness toward that daughter, especially. So I was always kind of like, okay, where's your Christianity when it comes to this? But it's very common. And it kind of reflects, you know, my experience growing up where the sinner's prayer, you know, you say the sinner's prayer, and that's what makes you a Christian. And there's this belief that it's the Holy Spirit that moves and creates that moment and brings you to Christ and all of those things. And I know my own conversion experience was I was, I was, I had to list church membership on top.

I grew up in the South. You know, you could be doing something secular and they still want to know what church do you belong to. And there was some organization that wanted to recognize black students who were doing well. And I filled out my little card at school and was turning it in. And this other kid saw my cart and it said, under church affiliation or whatever, I wrote various because I was going to various churches. And he laughed at me. Oh, he laughed so hard. It was a Friday, I'll never forget. And I asked the school uh administrative assistant, I said, Can I bring this back on Monday? And she said yes. So I had been going to my grandmother's church on my dad's side. I marched right up there when they had the altar call, and I said that sinner's prayer so that I couldn't be fine on Monday when I wrote Abyssinia Missionary Baptist Church on that card and turned it in.

And I did not have a conversion experience, you know. And so I think unfortunately, you know, people do that for lots of reasons. And so my character, maybe she did have a heartfelt experience, but it was more the I'm trying to get right. I'm trying to get right, and people say that, and they're trying to get right, but there's so much that goes untouched, like you said. So if you take a story like Dear Sister, that's a story about family and about these sisters. Dear sister, dear Jackie. Finally, I just told myself, you're either gonna read it or you're not, and it's not gonna come down to how I write it. It's all about who you are and what you've been through, and what if anything, it means to you to share a father with my sisters, Renee, Kimba, Toshita, and me.

Maybe it means nothing. Maybe your life has been just fine without our father in it, which I hope is the case. Maybe it means everything. And you've longed to know him and struggled because you didn't. Either way, you have a right to know that our father, Wallace Stead Brown, died last week of a massive stroke. As far as we know, you never met our father. The last time he saw you, you were an infant. If that's the case, and if it's any consolation, you didn't miss much. Toshita, our baby sister, wanted me to tell you that. We're all sitting around at grandma's house, and everyone is talking at once, telling me what I should write to you. You know, I'm mostly ignoring them. They picked me to write this because I shoot straight and don't mince words.

But I also have tagged, unlike Tashida. Oh, and in case you're wondering, we always just called it grandma's house. Even though granddaddy lived here too when he was alive. He died of a heart attack in 2002. God rest his soul. You would have loved him. Everybody did. Always had a joke or a funny story to tell. He was good people, just like grandma. They lost their kids to the street or hard living, one way or another. Even though they tried their best to raise them right. But some people just go their own way, you know. Anyway, back to Stet. Toshida is right. You didn't miss much. Stet, well, everybody called him Stett except for grandma because he wore a Stetson in high school. Stet wasn't much of a daddy.

Each of us girls had a different kind of relationship with him. None of them healthy. And none of them what we needed it to be. It's interesting to grow up in a household with siblings. And as adults, everybody had a different experience. Yes. So I I my life is like dear sister. Um, my mother's only child, but my father has five daughters. And there was a fifth sister that four of us knew about growing up. We we were never around her, we didn't get to know her. And someone said, when our father died, like you guys should contact her. And the four of us called her on speakerphone, which is you know, horrible to do to somebody, like, hey, he's dead, but we're your sisters. Um dear sister story is in epistolary form.

And so it was an opportunity to do that right. You know, this is it should have been a letter, but it was also an opportunity for me to create this world of sisters that I didn't have because I had my sisters, but we didn't grow up like that. And I wish that we could have been fighting and all of that, you know, the good and the bad, and and all of it in between, but we really didn't have that, and so I got to imagine what that was like. You didn't grow up because of the the age difference. Well, I mean, so the one the so the three sisters that I you know knew about growing up, two of them also have the same mother, and they always lived somewhere else, and there was other stuff going on there, and then my other sister, our mothers decided to kind of raise us like sisters, right?

Like the sisters we are, meaning that she, you know, I'd spend a night at her house, she came to mine. There's a three-year age difference, but we weren't in each other's lives as much as I wish we had been. But um, my but that one sister, our mothers initially when my sister was born because I was three years older, they were gonna like fight and all this, and then they're like, wait a minute, we're gonna fight over this guy. No, you know. Um, and they knew, and they told us the story when from the time we were little that they knew that he wasn't gonna be around, and they weren't gonna be around forever, but and we would need each other, and so I was you know connected with that sister in that way.

I think there's a large part of like we're not supposed to talk about what's going on in our families outside of the family, right? So there's a whole lot of secrecy around that, which then will may lead you to therapy as an adult, right? Hopefully, and then it's like as you get older, you start having these conversations with other people. I think because we don't get to write that many stories like this, we see church women in one particular way. Somebody reached out and said, I love these stories because it reminds me of the church women who as soon as church was out, they walk across the street to smoke a cigarette. I had never seen that before, but I think it's a perfect image, as Walt Whitman said.

We contain multitudes, you know. We are complex, we are nuanced, we are not the we don't fit neatly in the binaries that church often wants to put us in, including church women. And so there's so so much to who we are.

[29:21] Indira G. Wilson: And we'll be right back.

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[30:19] Indira G. Wilson: We are so glad you joined us for another episode of the Afro Existential Podcast. And take a moment to visit us at our website, Afro EX Podcast.com for more fun and insightful content. Anything else? Please click subscribe. And visit us at Instagram at the Afro EX Theater. Look at that. Look at that. Anything else? Email us your comments or questions at Afro EX Podcast at Gmail.com. Exactly. And a special thank you to our guest, Disha Fililla. And you can find out more about Desha and her book, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies at her website, dishafillaw.com. That's D-E-E-S-H-A. P H I L Y A W dot com. Anything else? Again, thank you for joining us. And as always, have a great day on purpose. The Afro Existential Podcast is part of the Broadway Podcast Network. Going on now.