[Deesha Philyaw, practical matters]: Making the leap from writing as a hobby, to a way to pay the bills, to a major career Ep 1290

This week my guest is Deesha Philyaw, who has been called “a bonafide literary treasure” by the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Deesha's short story collection, “The Secret Lives of Church Ladies,” was a 2020 National Book Award finalist, a Penn Faulkner Award for Fiction winner, and an LA Times Book Prize winner.
Now, her highly anticipated novel, “The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman,” has just come out. It follows Sharice Freeman, wife of the pastor of one of the largest black megachurches in America, as her hopes of winning the First Lady USA pageant are threatened when secrets from her previous life are revealed.
In this lively conversation where we dug into her creative path and process, we covered:
- Growing up in the evangelical church
- Doing all the “right” things and still being unhappy
- Starting writing as a hobby, then getting serious about making money as a writer post-divorce
- How she first started writing her brand-new novel over twenty years ago
- Her forthright–and funny–motivation for continuing to write
- Meeting her agent via a neighborhood potluck
- Why writers need to leave the house
- The $200 she and her writer friends kept loaning to each other when they were all trying to make ends meet
- How she went from a $5000 advance for her first book to a seven-figure two-book deal
- The financial realities of a seven-figure deal
- Her hard-won time-management strategies
- The gadget that prevents her from losing precious hours to social media
For full show notes with links to everything we discuss, plus bonus photos!, visit katehanley.substack.com.
Thank you for listening!

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