Celebration Interviews: Shawn Pipkin-West and Janean Jeffries on Fear, Layoffs, and Building Your Own

At our Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, we set up a podcast room and invited everyone in the building to interview each other with prompt cards. This is the eleventh of fifteen conversations from that day.

Our drop-in co-host Shawn Pipkin-West — a director and UPM who was a Sista Brunch guest twice before joining us behind the mic — sits down with her friend Janean Jeffries, an executive assistant. Asked what they believed five years ago and no longer do, Shawn says she believed she had to be perfect.

What replaced it is a practice of saying yes to what scares her, including this podcast. Janean believed she was too essential to be laid off while doing the work of seven people.

She was wrong, and what she took from it is sharper than bitterness: no one needs you, so create things for yourself and build your own community. Shawn also talks about directing one of five horror shorts made in two weeks, deliberately choosing the most ambitious script in the pile.

Being on Sista Brunch was on Janean's vision board. As of this episode, it's manifested — welcome to the family.

Watch the video version on YouTube (@TruJuLoMedia) or Apple Podcasts. The full unedited conversation is available to members at patreon.com/sistabrunch.

Filmed at The Recording Club, Santa Monica. Recorded during the Sista Brunch Season Six Celebration and Season Seven Fundraiser, produced with Pioneer Network.

Sista Brunch is brought to you by TruJuLo Productions, hosted and produced by Fanshen Cox, with our Season Seven team: Samantha K. Henderson, Tasha Rogers, Ashanti Groves, Charlie T.

Savage, Shawn Pipkin-West, and Maegan Philmore. Recorded on the unceded territory of the Tongva and the Chumash in Los Angeles.

Support the show: leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, and join us at patreon.com/sistabrunch.