Interview with Toni Ann Johnson

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Interview with Toni Ann Johnson
• Marame Gueye (bio) and Toni Ann Johnson

Toni Ann Johnson won the Flannery O’Connor Award for her linked story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste (October 2022), selected for the prize and edited by Roxane Gay. The book has also been nominated for a 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work.

Her novel, Remedy for a Broken Angel, released in 2014 was nominated for a 2015 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. In 2020, Johnson’s novella Homegoing won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest and was released in May 2021. She won the Missouri Review 2021 Miller Audio Prize for her story “Time Travel,” which is the final story in Light Skin Gone to Waste.

Johnson is a two-time winner of the Humanitas Prize: first, for her Disney/ABC screenplay, Ruby Bridges, the true story of the child who integrated the New Orleans public school system; a second Humanitas Prize win came in 2004 for Crown Heights, another true story, developed and written for Showtime Television. The film examined the aftermath of the Crown Heights riots of 1991. Johnson co-wrote the feature film Step Up 2: The Streets, the second installment of the successful Step Up franchise.

As a young playwright, Johnson’s work was produced Off-Broadway by The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) in 1989 when she and colleagues from the organization Black Women in Theatre partnered with playwright Leslie Lee and co-wrote Here in My Father’s House, which was staged at Theatre Four in New York City and directed by NEC’s founder, Douglas Turner Ward. Her subsequent play Gramercy Park is Closed to the Public was produced in 1999 by The New York Stage and Film Company. Johnson’s most recent play, presented in August of 2022 at The Cherry Center for the Arts in Carmel, California, is a one-woman show titled The Way We Fell Out of Touch, adapted from the short story (same title) that appears in Light Skin Gone to Waste. The play is based on Johnson’s Black mother and her relationship with the family’s White housekeeper in Monroe, New York during the 1970s.

In addition to her recent story collection, Johnson’s short fiction has appeared in The Emerson Review, Hunger Mountain, Callaloo, Aunt Chloe: A Journal of Artful Candor, The Coachella Review, and is forthcoming in Fiction Magazine’s 50th anniversary issue.

Marame Gueye:

Congratulations on winning the Flannery O’Connor Prize. I want to open this conversation by focusing on genre and how a writer chooses to do a novel or a collection of stories. Light Skin Gone to Waste could have been a novel with a novelistic arc. What have you accomplished in a short story collection that you could not have done in a novel? [End Page 5]

Toni Ann Johnson:

The book began as a linked story collection in 2007 when I was doing my MFA in creative writing. I was learning to write fiction after having been a playwright and screenwriter for many years. I read several collections, and the linked ones appealed to me. Sherman Alexie’s The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven was particularly interesting because he tracks the same characters over time, which was something I wanted to do. When I read his book, I had already written a couple of stories, and I’d been thinking about others. I was writing fictionalized versions of memories from my childhood. Alexie’s book confirmed that what I was trying to do could work. I never planned to write the book as a novel because the memories were episodic.

Most novels have an arc wherein the characters transform by the end in some way. There’s an expectation of a payoff to a dramatic question set up early on. There’s often a discernible three-act structure. Linked story collections don’t necessarily provide that. The character transformations may be subtle or come within stories but not as a big payoff at the end. Some main characters may not transform at all. In my book, Velma and Phil don’t evolve or come to...