Jacksonville native Deesha Philyaw is at the top of her game, turning her award-winning debut short story collection into an HBO Max series, working on a new novel, and preparing to be a writer in residence at the University of Mississippi. She spoke with Kimm D. Lett about the South and writing about “a peach cobbler so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife.”
Interview by Kimm D. Lett
September 09, 2021
In her debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Jacksonville native Deesha Philyaw renders a world where Black women aren’t a monolith and lead complicated lives. There’s an enduring care that knits together the longing felt by each character, most of whom have Southern roots. The characters are queer and open about their sexuality, their longing for intimacy, and their justifiable thirst for revenge. Philyaw’s characters are without masks, façades, or pretense — worlds apart from the respectable lives of the “Southern ladies” she witnessed growing up in church. Back then, as a curious teen, she questioned everything from the sermons about sin and hell to the silence and shame surrounding sex, and the lives of the women who attended church: Do they like to have sex? Do they masturbate? They are beautifully adorned on the outside, but what’s happening on the inside? A church lady herself until the age of 35, Philyaw reflects on her own experience, saying, “It all felt like work and performance.”
Philyaw’s book is the winner of the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 Los Angeles Times Book Prize’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. Recently, it was nominated for the Hurston/Wright Foundation’s 2021 Legacy Award, and it made the 2020 National Book Awards’ Shortlist for Fiction. She is also co-writing and co-producing (along with Tessa Thompson) an HBO Max adaptation.
Philyaw was recently named John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi, where she will teach during the 2022-2023 academic year and work on her next novel. This will bring her back down South to live after being away since 1989.
Deesha Philyaw. PHoto by Vanessa German.
Talking to Philyaw is like a homecoming — a breath of fresh air. She’s as sweet as the peach cobbler she writes so lovingly about, but also as fiery and Southern a wordsmith in the tell-it-like-it-is fashion of Zora Neale Hurston. Philyaw centers the interior lives of Black women in her stories with the ultimate message: “Be loud, take up space, get what you want.” And in the short stories of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Philyaw uses her fiction to confront antiquated ideas and beliefs about womanhood and sexuality. During our conversation, filled with laugh-out-loud moments, we discussed distinctly Southern ways of talking, powerful first lines in her short stories, and some of her favorite foods.
1. Kimm D. Lett: Were people in the South, particularly churchgoers, receptive to The Secret Lives of Church Ladies?
Deesha Philyaw: The only people I’ve heard from were supportive of the book. I’ve had people share with me how this book has sparked conversation between family members, especially mothers and daughters. I’ve met with book club groups of Black women pastors and a church group led by a Black woman pastor.
2. KDL: Were the stories and characters in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies based on anyone’s life?
DP: I certainly didn’t take any one person’s story and dress it up in fiction, because that would not have been fair. In fiction, you can take a kernel of truth, or someone’s situation, or a kernel of something you hear, build a world around it and play “what if.” “Dear Sister” was inspired by my own situation with my four half-sisters. Instead of it being a letter, we made a phone call, which I regret. You just don’t call somebody under those circumstances, with four people on the phone like, “Hey, we’re your sisters!” When I wrote that story, it was a do-over, a chance to do it right and imagine what could have been.
3. KDL: Let’s talk about growing up in the South and the stories’ relationships to the South. First, when exactly did you leave?
DP: I left the South in 1989, when I went to college. One of the many ways the South is so integral, other than the story being set there, is there’s nothing like the South. Nobody talks like us. And so much of my nostalgia and so many of my memories are around “food and voices,'' what people said, and the nonverbal conversations — the looks, the rolling of the eyes, and the sucking of the teeth. And it was that language I grew up witnessing along with my peers and elders.
There were the ways we talked to and about each other. When each of the characters spoke, I could hear them. I could hear my grandmother in the older characters, which were some of my favorite characters to write. Like Granny in my story “Jael,” even though neither my grandmother nor great-grandmother were religious. I can hear other older people as they were quoting the Bible, but there were certain rhythms and reflections and things that my grandmother would say and the way she reacted to things. I thought, “That was totally my grandmother.” I can still hear her voice, and she’s been gone since 2005.
The music of our language as Black Southerners is so resonant, and that stayed with me. And then the food, of course, and not just what we ate, but how food was a part of our rituals and culture. I spent so much time watching my mother and my grandmother cook, and the care and how precise they were cooking really felt like a ritual. It was easy to write about.
KDL: And I love how you center Southern Black women in each of your stories.
DP: Yes, I spent so much of my childhood watching Black women. I’ve always watched Black women to see what’s possible while asking, “Who are they in the world? How can I be in the world? How do they carry themselves? What do they tolerate?” I was raised in a house of women. At one point, we had four generations in one house. My childhood was so woman centered, so Black woman centered, so Southern Black woman centered. I marvel at myself when I write about anyone else.
4. KDL: And what inspired the young Black girl character in the story “Peach Cobbler”?
DP: There was a prompt and a call for submissions about food. There is also this activity I do in workshops called “Fabulous First Lines.” I like to challenge other writers, including myself, to pack as much into the first line that would make somebody want to read the story. I wanted to write a kickass first line, and I knew I wanted to write some sort of story about food. I thought about the Blackest food I could think of, and a little girl. I remember growing up in church confused. I thought the preachers were God. And when people would say God is in Heaven, I would spend time outside just looking at the skies thinking I could see God’s face in the clouds.
KDL: Yes! And I remember looking up at the steeple of the church when people would say the church grows every time a person joins. I waited for that steeple to grow higher and higher into the sky.
DP: (Laughing) It was a confusing time. We were literal, black and white thinkers! But I thought God was really up in the sky, and I wanted to see him. I ended up with that first line after remembering peach cobbler and a story I wrote years ago titled “God in the Clouds” and wrote, “My mother made a peach cobbler so good, it made God himself cheat on his wife.” I knew that the little girl speaking thought the pastor was God and that he was cheating on his wife with her mother. With that first line, I got my story. So I had to figure out who the little girl was and who her mother was … what was up between the little girl’s mother and the pastor. Then I needed to build from that vantage point. As I knew with any good story, this peach cobbler just isn’t peach cobbler; it means so much more. The peach cobbler meant love and care, attention and sweetness, for this little girl, which she doesn’t get from her mother.
KDL: That’s precisely how I read it; there was a longing for affection from her mother. And the yearning was akin to the loneliness felt by the characters in “Snowfall.” They desired warmth, sunshine, and a romanticized version of their home in the South. In that story, you delivered another mouth-dropping, kickass first line, “Black women aren’t meant to shovel snow.”
5. KDL: Did you ever long to return to Jacksonville?
DP: I saw myself living in the city of Pittsburgh for the rest of my life; even though Jacksonville loomed so large in my memory, it wasn’t ever one of the contenders when I considered returning South. Growing up, I was such an avid reader, and there was more of the world I wanted to see. My mother, father, and my grandmother died in 2005, and with those losses I don’t know if I want to ever go back there and live. However, I longed to be somewhere Blacker if I ever moved out of the city, which often means moving South.
6. KDL: What is your favorite recipe out of all the food and recipes you shared in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies?
DP: I love a good crab boil. I get the blue crabs when I’m in Maryland. There are nine stories [in The Secret Lives of Church Ladies], and two of them mention crab boils.
7. KDL: What are you currently reading?
DP: Let me shout out Walking on Cowrie Shells by Nana Nkweti. I just wrote a New York Times book review for her short story collection. I’m enjoying a lot of new books, including Dear Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell and Nobody’s Magic by Destiny O. Birdsong [coming out February 2022], set in Louisiana.
Kimm D. Lett lives in Atlanta and is a communications and digital media strategist. She is founder of flowers bookclub, an online community for healing conversations that bring together authors, thought leaders, activists, and scholars focused on issues affecting the most marginalized. She is a native of Alabama’s Gulf Coast and proud mother to a Spelman College student. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @kimmdlett.
