How's the Writing Going, Deesha Philyaw?

“For me, getting better as a writer is learning how to get to the essence of things and boil down all of that exposition and backstory.”

DEESHA PHILYAW’s debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, the 2020 LA Times Book Prize, and the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. The collection was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. 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. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022–2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi.

SARI BOTTON is the author of the memoir in essays, And You May Find Yourself...Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo. She is the former Essays Editor for Longreads, and edited the bestselling anthologies Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving NewYork and Never Can Say Goodbye: Writers on Their Unshakable Love for New York. She teaches creative nonfiction at Bay Path University and Kingston Writers' Studio, and is the Writer in Residence at SUNY New Paltz for Spring, 2023. She publishes Oldster Magazine, Memoir Monday, and Adventures in Journalism.

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*A version of this interview was originally conducted in July, 2022 for Catapult. (RIP Catapult!)

This is a column called How’s the Writing Going? It’s the question no writer wants to be asked—but which every writer wants to ask others. We want to know that other people are struggling the same way we are or to learn other writers’ hacks and antidotes for blocks and other challenges.

Here I chat with Deesha Philyaw about interrogating writer’s block, working on multiple projects at the same time, and how character can drive plot.

Sari Botton: So tell me what’s going on with you and your work.

Deesha Philyaw: After my book came out, the University of Mississippi offered me the John and Renée Grisham Writer in Residence opportunity. So I’m there for the 2022–2023 academic year. I have a light teaching load at the university because the purpose is for me to write my next book, and the best part is I get to live in John Grisham’s old house on seventy-seven acres. 

SB: So you’re writing a new book. That’s exciting. How’s the writing going? And has it been maybe a little easier now than it might have been in the depths of, say, pre-vaccination Covid-19 times?

DP: I’ve been writing a lot since 2020, prior to my book coming out that September. When the pandemic hit, one of the things we could keep doing safely was reading and writing. And so I’ve written a lot of short stories. I’ve been working on a novel. I also started working on a YA novel, and The Secret Lives of Church Ladies story collection is being adapted for television, and I’m writing that as well. So I’m just bouncing around between projects. But in the back of my mind, I think, I really should be working on the outline for my novel because my agent is waiting on that. It’s like whack-a-mole. Whack-a-mole is how it’s going.

SB: You’ve also got a podcast, Ursa Story, with author Dawnie Walton and Longreads founder Mark Armstrong, focused on short fiction and amplifying underrepresented writers. You are doing a lot! Is this new for you, this whack-a-mole approach, or is it part of how you’ve always worked?

DP: I’ve always worked on more than one thing at a time and sometimes in more than one genre at a time. I’ve also been writing some essays during the pandemic as well.

SB: I sort of work that way too. I call it “cheating.” I often need to toggle between at least two projects. When I’m stuck on my primary project, I need to be able to cheat on it with another one. And then when I get too stuck on the other one, I need to cheat on it with the primary project. 

DP: I like that. When I have a deadline looming, I kind of zero in, like I’ve got to bang this out. But up until that time, I’ll waffle back and forth between different things. In February I got to spend a month alone in Miami just to write. I thought, I’m gonna spend a week finishing up the short story that I’ve been working on. And then I’ll spend three weeks working on the novel. It ended up being the opposite; I spent three weeks working on this story and then had a week just to work on the novel. It was fine. I thought, Excuse me, the story took as much time as it needed to take.