Last week I made a weekday trek up to Baltimore—just a week after breezing through town for events connected with the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP) Conference—to attend a reading by my fellow 2024 Kimbilio Fiction fellow Toni Ann Johnson. She was at the wonderfully funky bookstore and café Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, reading from and signing copies of her new novella and story collection, But Where’s Home?.
A continuation of the linked collection she previously published, Light Skin Gone to Waste, the new book returns to the Arrington family in suburban Monroe, New York and nearby environs. The stories chronicle the tumultuous and intertwined lives of this upper–middle-class Black family at a moment when their social world and aspirations still felt new, almost like an unfolding social experiment. (My general thesis is that the 1960s and 1970s are decades Gen X writers should keep returning to. They were fascinating and deeply transitional times for Black folks all over America. So much dissecting still to be done.)
Johnson’s writing is elegant, witty, and richly character-driven. With her background in screenwriting, you can easily visualize the spaces and moments her characters inhabit. Worldbuilding is usually associated with speculative and science fiction, but I think social realist writers of a certain skill practice something closer to world revealing, melding time and place into their stories in a way that unveils setting and history as if they were characters in their own right. The stories in her Light Skin Gone to Waste also do a good job to awaken emotional sensibilities without leaning on melodrama. That restraint is one of the hallmarks of strong writing I most admire: narratives so confident and fluid that they carry you into people’s lives and inner worlds until you almost forget you’re reading fiction at all, with characters who make you care without resorting to treacly appeals.
At a moment when some publishing house editors have told me they regard multigenerational Black family saga narratives as passé, it’s cool to see a writer of Johnson’s caliber stick to and find success in the genre with freshness. The Arrington stories would make an excellent mini-series. Consider this my attempt to call that into existence. A tangent: Recently, while thumbing through Netflix looking for something to watch, I landed on the latest installment of Madea madness from Tyler Perry—Joe’s College Trip or some such nonsense. As with all his work, I decided to give it a shot. Campy, jokey physical comedy in TV and film is an underrated art, and I like to give Perry the benefit of the doubt that he knows exactly where his products fit and stretch that tradition (Charlie Chaplin, Groucho Marx, Stooges, Bowery Boys, Lucy, Dick Van Dyke to the Wayans and Martin Lawrence. I love that stuff). I lasted all of fifteen minutes.
No disrespect to a man who clearly knows how to make his paper (and clearly he does). Still, it left me hoping that writers with more artful sensibilities and fresher literary stories find their place in today’s crowded and often silly creative media landscape. those are the stories I’m waiting to see—and read.
Keep on keeping on, literary cohorts.