In this interview conducted over email, Editor in Chief Courtney Harler asks Deesha to share her approaches to writing voice, humor, sex scenes, and setting. Be sure to read to the very end for some great advice! Courtney Harler: Thank you for taking the time to correspond with me about your work, Deesha. How do you listen for, suss out, play with, settle upon, express with, voice in your fiction?
Deesha Philyaw: Sometimes a story starts out for me as an idea or a situation, but most often it starts out as a thought or line of dialogue. And that thought or line becomes the blueprint on which I build the rest of the story. I not only follow the substance of the thought or dialogue, I also figure out who is thinking or speaking, how they are saying it, what their voice or internal monologue sounds like, and what the context is for all of it. Hearing myself speaking as the character helps me better understand the character—their voice, their perspectives, their motivations, their fears and desires, and so on.
Even if it feels uncomfortable to my ear, that discomfort can reveal so much about the character and the story as a whole. How do you harness humor as a function of voice, and what do you see as the core utility, the necessary purpose, of humor in your writing? I do think humor emerges frequently and naturally in my work because my social and cultural experience—like that of so many Black women in this country, for centuries—is one in which laughter and irreverence coexist alongside trauma and tragedy.
My mother spent the last six weeks of her life in hospice and during that time, we laughed more than we weeped. CH: Sex is hard to write too. Society may expect women to be squeamish about writing sex, but Church Ladies is so sexual, so sensual: dreamlike in its descriptions but oh so very real. DP: Sex is always the answer, ha!
It can be a traditional sex scene or scene with sexual tension but no actual sex. Though you can glean a lot from a scene like that too. In fact, one woman told me that an acclaimed woman writer told her that she could write about everything except sex, because doing so would ruin her credibility as a writer.
