A Conversation with Story Foundation Prize Judge Deesha Philyaw

 

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, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and was a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, a Baldwin for the Arts Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and co-host of two podcasts, Ursa Short Fiction (with Dawnie Walton) and Reckon True Stories (with Kiese Laymon). She is currently at work developing TV shows based on her short fiction. Deesha’s debut novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, is forthcoming from Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, in 2026.

Story is thrilled to have Deesha Philyaw as our guest judge for the 7^th Annual Story Foundation Prize. In this interview, conducted over email by Contest Editor Heather Aronson, the award-winning author of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies answers a few questions about her own work and journey to publication, as well as the qualities she looks for in a winning short story. Her generous responses offer warmth, wisdom, and inspiration for writers and readers alike, as well as insight into the kind of writing that separates good fiction from great, memorable fiction.

 

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HEATHER ARONSON

We are so honored to have you as a judge for our 7^th annual  Story Foundation Prize, and we’re grateful that you’ve agreed to make time for this interview as well. Your book, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, is one of the most compelling and successful short story collections in recent memory, winning everything from the PEN/Faulkner Award to the L.A. Times Book Prize, as well as being named a finalist for the National Book Award. Would you mind telling us something about the process of bringing it to publication? For instance, though the quality of the stories suggests that you’ve been writing short fiction for a very long time, their publication dates all fall within three years or so of the collection’s debut in 2020. At what point did you realize you had a marketable book on your hands? How long did it take from that realization to publication? Was it difficult to find an agent?

DEESHA PHILYAW

Believe it or not, finding an agent was actually the easiest part of the whole process. In 2002 in Pittsburgh, I moved into a new neighborhood and was invited to my neighbor’s house for a party. She asked what I did for a living, and even though I hadn’t published and wasn’t making a living at it yet, I had begun saying I was a writer. She told me her husband’s best friend from college was married to an agent, who also lived in Pittsburgh. And she offered to introduce us. I told her I didn’t have anything to show an agent. Fast forward to 2010/2011, and my ex-husband and I are looking for an agent to rep our nonfiction co-parenting book. So I reached out to my neighbor for that introduction to Danielle Chiotti. She liked our book proposal and offered representation.

 The co-parenting book came out in 2013. Danielle knew I was also working on a novel and told me she was looking forward to reading it. Not long after that, I stalled on the novel but had continued to write short stories. I began the “oldest” stories in Church Ladies in 2013/2014. Around 2016/2017, I was still struggling with the novel, and Danielle had an idea. She really liked these “church ladies” stories I was writing. (She saw that through-line in the stories; I didn’t.) So while I took a hiatus from the novel (she was being very generous/diplomatic!), maybe I could shift my focus to building a collection of short stories around the theme of Black women, sex, and the Black church? She told me that once I got three stories published, we could go out on submission with a partial manuscript. I liked that challenge; it felt infinitely more doable than “finish this novel I’ve been trying to write for a decade.”

By the time I had three stories published, I had written six, and against all conventional wisdom––short story collections don’t sell, short stories definitely don’t sell as debuts, and partial manuscripts don’t sell––Danielle took it out on submission in 2019. The collection was rejected by every publisher she sent it to except one, West Virginia University Press. I got a very small advance, and Church Ladies was the lead title for WVUP’s Fall 2020 season.

 ARONSON

The Secret Lives of Church Ladies is such a striking title, and one that so perfectly encompasses each of the stories included in the collection. It was only after a second reading that I realized that it was not only not the title of any individual piece, but that the phrase itself doesn’t appear within any of them. Did you have the title in mind when you selected the stories, or did it occur to you after you’d made the decision of which to include?

PHILYAW

Danielle and I each credit the other with coming up with the title. We don’t remember! But one of us came up with the title while Danielle encouraged me to become intentional about building a collection. So I had the title in mind as I wrote the majority of the stories.

 ARONSON

I understand that your novel, The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, will be debuting soon. Congratulations! Assuming this is the first novel you’ve written, what was it like to turn from crafting short stories to the writing of a sustained, longer work of fiction? Did you consciously set out to write a novel, or did you discover you were writing one as the work evolved? Do you prefer one form over the other? If so, why?

PHILYAW

Thank you! True Confessions is the novel I’d been working on since 2006, when I took a detour to write Church Ladies. As soon as I turned in the manuscript for Church Ladies in September 2019, I went right back to my novel manuscript and scrapped pretty much everything except the main character (the first lady of a megachurch who is fifteen years younger than her pastor husband) and a scandal at the heart of the story. I had grown as a writer, in terms of my understanding of craft and storytelling, but more importantly, after finishing Church Ladies, my confidence had grown.

Also, I changed the nature of the scandal so that it became actually scandalous, with higher stakes, and I had a clearer sense of who my main character was. She was no longer me, just fictionalized, which gave me room to develop her into someone who had values and interests that were wildly different from mine. She does things I would never do, and consequently, she’s bolder than I am and was a lot of fun to write. I also decided to make the novel satirical. It had always had elements of humor, but I made it even funnier and more satirical.

I finished 60,000 words of True Confessions in late spring 2023, and that summer, Danielle took it out on submission, another partial manuscript. The novel sold at auction in June 2023, and, working with my fabulous editor, Rakia Clark at Mariner Books, I finished it this month (October). It will be out in fall 2026.

I appreciate both forms and don’t have a preference. But I can’t see myself writing two complete novels back to back. I need a break! That said, I’m always multi-tasking. So while I’ve turned my attention to my next collection of stories, which is part of my two-book deal with Mariner, I’ll still sometimes pivot and work on my next novel a little bit from time to time.

ARONSON

I had the pleasure of reading the flash fiction you selected for fractured lit volume 2, and was struck by the cohesion of theme and even character that emerges despite the many different voices telling the many disparate tales. You write in the volume’s Introduction that the characters “are people just trying to hold on—to life or what’s left of it, and to those whom they care about.” In choosing the stories for this volume, were you thinking about them in relation to one another, as well as evaluating each independently?

PHILYAW

As I read the submissions, I was looking for freshness, voice, surprises (in language, form, plot), and risk-taking. I wasn’t thinking about how or whether the stories would cohere. I have a kind of faith in the writing process that extends to the editing and curation processes as well. I believe there’s only so much orchestration we can do, and only so much we should do. If we allow space for it, something really magical and organic will happen on the page. I’ve experienced it time and time again in my own writing. Things just click, phrases just pop. Of course, this magic coexists alongside the tangible work of revision. But I trust myself and the process to include some je ne sais quoi. So I trusted that the stories I chose would work as a collection, which meant accepting the challenge of identifying and articulating a theme after the fact. And I’m so glad it worked out.

 ARONSON

One final question: since the publication of The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, you’ve been asked to serve as a judge for any number of literary contests, including ours. When you think about the winners you’ve chosen in the past, what qualities, in particular, made one story stand out from the rest?

PHILYAW

The same qualities as I mentioned above––freshness, voice, surprises, and risk-taking. Heavy on the risk-tasking, where the writer’s willingness to create their own lane is evident. Or, if inspired by another writer, to do something innovative in that lane. But practically speaking, it’s the story I can’t put down. I skim through all the stories first, reading the first few paragraphs or the first page of each, and then start over and read them all through. The winner is the one where I don’t stop after the first page on that first read. It’s the story that I read straight through to the end.