Toni Ann Johnson – Women Who Submit

August 21, 2023August 24, 2023

Intersect: The Community of Submit 1

by Kate Maruyama

I’ve been a fan of Submit 1 since its first year when I hosted hour one and talked about strategies for submitting and dealing with rejections. As I spoke on Instagram Live, people chimed in with questions and announced when they had made a submission and we cheered as a group! It was early and I was just getting my coffee. I was thrilled by how I had just woken up and I was already in a virtual room full of supportive writers. The Women Who Submit Community were at work that morning and throughout the day and I dipped in as other hosts shared their experiences, tips, and claps and cheers. The feeling that we were all working together toward a common goal made it a singular space.

Women Who Submit has been a huge part of my life. In the ten years since I joined, it has been a resource support, a place to keep me on task in submitting my work, and a place to ask any questions about writing, publishing, and even job opportunities. A lot of things that I’ve had published are because of attending submission parties and being cheered on as I pressed SEND.

Last year Toni Ann Ann Johnson asked me to join the hour of Submit 1 she was hosting, along with our friend and colleague Nicole D. Sconiers. I’m always happy to learn more from Toni Ann, who leads really good discussions and is always a fabulous host.

Flyer from the Submit 1, hour with Toni Ann Johnson, Kate Maruyama, and Nicole D. Sconiers.

What followed was a conversation about all the ways in which Toni Ann, Nicole, and I are intertwined with our work, mutual support, friendship, and careers. All three of us told stories about times we were so frustrated, we gave up. We were there for each other, coaxing each other back to work, to the submitting, to the myriad jobs that go into being a writer. It felt like it was the most “Women Who Submit moment ever” as we talked, comments rolled in from members who were submitting all over the country and we cheered them on.

Toni Ann and Nicole are both my first readers. We have been exchanging work for years. We met each other in different ways. Toni Ann and Nicole shared Alma Luz Villanueva as a mentor. Nicole and I met as students in our MFA workshop where I was so excited by her speculative fiction story “Here Come the Janes” that I basically started hounding her for more stories. Later, she hired me to edit her first collection: Escape from Beckyville, Tales of Race Hair and Rage. I kept on her to write and submit after that because at that time, her speculative fiction, which she described as “A Black Woman’s Twilight Zone” was rare and needed. This was 2009 and predated Black Mirror as well as Get Out.

Toni Ann’s fingerprints are all over my three novels that came after Harrowgate. She is not only my first reader, she’s the reason my upcoming book Alterations happened at all. She inspired the idea by asking why I didn’t write about old movies since I loved them so much, and she provided thorough notes on two drafts of the book. When my agent had given up on that book, Toni Ann didn’t and prodded me to believe in my characters and my story and to submit the book independently to small presses. There’s a “you can definitely do this” stalwart belief Toni Ann has in all of her suggestions. Even at my weakest, darkest moments, she encourages me to find that belief again. When the book, after ten years of support from Toni Ann, finally sold, she was the person I called first.

You can read more about our mutual support in a conversation we had for The Coachella Review “You Can’t Do This Shit Alone.” Toni Ann and I have both found similar support in WWS where there is this idea that a rising tide raises all boats and we share resources, encourage each other, and think of ways that each writer in the group can improve, submit, and promote their own work.

In an email exchange, Nicole said, “Toni Ann is not only supportive of my fiction writing but my screenwriting as well. She encouraged me to submit to the ScreenCraft script competition. I submitted my sci-fi thriller Spectacle to the 2022 ScreenCraft Sci-Fi & Fantasy competition and was named a finalist out of more than 3,000 submissions! She also provided coverage for my script Bless the Mic and shared the screenplay with a director who hired me for a writing project.”

Nicole has been a go-to for my genre short stories and for my literary novels. I know she won’t hold any punches and will be open and honest about anything I’m writing. She gave me notes on my new novella Safer (paired with Family Solstice in my new book Bleak Houses out now from Raw Dog Screaming Press) and is the queen of details.

During our Submit 1 conversation Toni Ann had this to say, “Nicole helped me refine details and elements of (fact-checked) some of my fiction, which led me to clarify or emphasize the veracity of my details. She also made helpful (and humbling!) corrections to spelling/grammar/punctuation. We have also exchanged some of our screenwriting. I’ve read at least two of Nicole’s screenplays (which I loved!) and she’s read at least one of mine. Over the years, I’ve recommended Nicole as a writer and as a manuscript consultant to multiple friends and colleagues.”

This was such a beautiful thing to recount for WWS members in our hour of Submit 1 with Toni Ann and, as we told these stories, more writers helped by this circle of friends tuned in, in the comments. We realized these stories tell the far reach of the WWS community. Some folks submitted their work while we were talking: it was peak Submit 1.

During this magical hour on IG Live, I realized that without Toni Ann and Nicole, half of the wonderful things that have come my way wouldn’t have happened at all.

All writers are out there alone, getting up our nerve to submit, but it is this kind of community, helping each other out with drafts, encouraging each other when we lose hope, and bolstering each other through tough times that makes WWS a profound group to belong to.

Toni Ann put it best when she wrote, “As you both know, this writing journey is not easy, there are good times, but when the hard times hit hard, they can be unspeakably dismal–at least for me–and I’ve been lifted in low times by each of you.”

Together we can do so much. Our upcoming Submit 1 slogan is “One community, one day, one submission at a time.” You can join our community virtually by tuning into Instagram Live on September 9 (@womenwhosubmit) or check in with this website to learn how to participate in person!

Kate Maruyama is the author of *Harrowgate* (47North)*, Halloween Beyond: A Gentleman’s Suit* (Crystal Lake Publishing), and Bleak Houses (RDS Press) and upcoming novels *The Collective* (Running Wild) and Alterations (Writ Large). Her short work appears in numerous journals and anthologies. She writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles.

March 30, 2022

Toward Reckoning

A review of Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing
by Hazel Kight Witham

I first heard Toni Ann Johnson bring voice to a character onstage at a reading in the MFA program we shared. I barely knew Toni Ann, but I was swept into the world of her fiction by the characters she illuminated with her humor, vivid dialogue, intriguing conflict, and acting chops. 

I didn’t know she had a significant history as an actress, both on stage and in film, and experience giving characters voice through her work as an award-winning screenwriter: she won the Humanitas Prize for her screenplay “Ruby Bridges,” another one for “Crown Heights,” a true story about two teens who connect in the wake of the Crown Heights unrest of 1991. 

Toni Ann Johnson’s novella, Homegoing, winner of Accent Publishing’s Novella contest in 2021, explores vital questions we all need to reckon with. The book opens in New York City, the winter of 2006. At the outset, Maddie, a singer, has just suffered her second miscarriage and her husband, who reminds her he “wasn’t ready” for a baby anyway, is bailing back to Los Angeles.

She is twisted with grief and the shock of betrayal, “curled up like a fist on the floor.” A phone call with her mother, Velma, reveals that she is more interested in who from their mostly white neighborhood in the New York suburbs has ended up on the obituary pages. Her mother’s inability to listen or empathize with Maddie, or even allow space for her to share the news of her miscarriage, is breathtaking.

 Hollowed by these twin losses: her baby, Nina, and her partner of ten years, Rolando, Maddie is further leveled by the inability to voice her grief. Her mother doesn’t know how to listen, and neither does her father. She spends a week invisible, bedridden, underwater. She can’t go to her job as a singer in a piano bar, she is cut off from her voice. A visit from her mother gets her up and moving but she is still heavy with sorrow that no one seems to want to let her express.

On the TV all the channels begin covering Seinfeld star Michael Richards’s racist meltdown on the stage of the Laugh Factory in LA, the place Maddie’s husband is headed without her. Richards’s vitriolic performance of this country’s deep-seated racism, compounded by her mother’s mourning of a white neighbor, brings Maddie’s childhood rushing back. She grew up the only Black child in a white, conservative town in the wealthy New York suburbs, where kids who are her friends in kindergarten “realize she’s Black” by third grade. They perform the racist behaviors they inherit from their elders, and no one seems to think there’s anything wrong with that.

The performance of overt racism becomes a through line. While the comedian is publicly called out, Maddie reckons with the trouble of returning home to that mostly white, conservative town as the holidays descend. A neighbor’s death brings her back to her hometown on New Year’s Eve to both mourn one more loss and contend with the harms of the past. The kids who filled her childhood are all grown up now, and Maddie, raw with grief and the loneliness it brings, asks some of them to account for their childhood transgressions and their cowardly silence.

The responses range, and reveal the complexity of reckoning: her own mother dismisses Maddie’s memories, the bully acknowledges and apologies, her friend Tobias, “breaker of her young heart,” just wants to move on.

But the story is not, of course, only about grief and racial reckoning. Johnson’s humor is a through line too. It comes in memorable scenes, like when Velma’s spiteful Dachshund seems the embodiment of microaggressions—a snapping, snarling, unapologetic creature that Velma defends unconditionally. It comes in the dialogue that renders each character vivid and compelling.

Humor and reckoning collide too when Velma once again offers her daughter up to this community with all its blind spots, racism, and privilege. The novella rises to a crescendo in the scene where Maddie’s mother Velma has volunteered Maddie to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the deceased. Maddie learns she will be performing just moments before when she sees her name on the program, and has no time to prepare for this sudden call. She is furious with her mother, but takes the stage anyway, standing before the mostly white community, the handful of people of color, performing a beloved anthem in this display of public grief.

Johnson reminds us of the complexity of this song, an ode to awakening, to being lost and then finding redemption, a song written by a slave trader who made his fortune trafficking in African lives. As Maddie sings before the crowd she asks herself, “What am I doing standing in this white church in this white town that crushed my spirit, singing the words of a white supremacist who wrote it for his own forgiveness? Why should I forgive?”

Maddie’s grief—for her lost child, her broken marriage, her challenging parents, and the betrayals of this childhood home, make for a tricky performance. “Singing magnified every feeling,” and when she falters, her childhood friend, daughter of the deceased steps up, calls for the community to step up, and they begin to sing together, offering this complicated, beautiful song back to Maddie. The moment is riveting, but also another kind of performance: what is it to sing of being lost then found, blind, then seeing, when so much has still been unaccounted for? What grace is this community asking without having done the work to earn it?

It is a moving moment, but Johnson quickly reminds us of how far we still must go. When that childhood friend Tobias is bitten by her mother’s vicious Dachshund, he offers a trade: the harm and disregard he perpetrated in the past for present forgiveness of canine transgression, as if the two could be comparable: “Maddie, how ’bout, I let this go, and you let your stuff go?”

She responds: “Let it go where? Where do I send it?”

Shortly after, a neighbor with Alzheimer’s unleashes a racist diatribe against Maddie, lunging at her as he hollers the n-word and rails that she doesn’t belong in the house. It is a scene that brings the Laugh Factory moment directly to Maddie, highlighting all the vicious ignorance of our shared past.

When the beleaguered wife of the man apologizes for his behavior, Maddie thanks her, but doesn’t let her off the hook: “I’m surprised though…Because you called me the same thing when I was a kid. You hated ‘us people’.” Now the woman is friendly with Maddie’s mother, and Maddie wants to know: “What’s changed?”

By the end, Johnson’s character understands the impact of this place of her childhood better. “The voice of this place had been loud and she’d carried it with her all her life. Now she saw that the voice was nothing but a beat-down, demented, old fossil clinging to the need to be better because its own image was so fragile.”

“What’s changed?” is a question that Homegoing asks of all of us. What does healing look like? How can we reckon with the past if we do not listen to those hurt by it, and make authentic amends? How do we hold each other accountable for harm? How do we reconcile with each other in this country where so much brutality was baked into the beginning, and the legacy of it lives on in our language, in our actions and inactions? How do we make amends, instead of dismissing old wounds, or hiding behind excuses?

What truth and reconciliation might be possible in this country if we could do that? If we could hold space for the grief and trauma our history has brought, and that our present perpetuates, but work toward better for one another as we move together into something new?

Toni Ann Johnson’s Homegoing invites us through the story of Maddie and the vibrant scenes she inhabits, to consider how we listen, how we honor, and how we make amends—authentically, not performatively—so that we may move toward collective grace together.

Hazel Kight Witham is a mother, teacher, slam poetry coach, and writer who was made in Los Angeles and still calls it home. She has published work in The Sun, Bellevue Literary Review, Integrated Schools, Mutha Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Rising Phoenix Review and other journals. She is a proud public school teacher in LAUSD and was a 2020 finalist for California Teacher of the Year. She is a member of Women Who Submit, and gathering with them throughout the high seas of pandemic kept her afloat as a writer. Find her work here: www.hazelkightwitham.com.

November 17, 2021November 17, 2021

Time Travel

In conjunction with the launch of Gathering: a Women Who Submit Anthology, we celebrate the fiction of member Toni Ann Johnson. In “Time Travel” from SPROUT MAGAZINE and republished in RED FEZ and ARLIJO, Toni Ann helps us looks across decades in just a few paragraphs. Congratulations to Toni Ann whose work was recently awarded the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. To hold this story and others order Gathering here now!

by TONI ANN JOHNSON

Twenty-one years later I’ll run into you outside the Path Station in Hoboken in front of the wide green awning that leads down to the trains. Sounds of rumbling below and the din of chatter swirling, you’ll yell my name above the noise, saying it like a question, as if you could actually be unsure that it’s me.

I’ll turn and totter on the top step. Just in time. Seconds later and I’d be swept into the stream of bodies flowing to the tracks.

It’ll be shortly after 5pm on a late September weekday, humid and sunny, with air that smells of commuters caught in unexpected high heat. Perspiration will roll down my back and leak between the butt cheeks you used to make fun of.

I’ll squint against the sun and stare at you. You’ll smile with closed lips and brown eyes that’ll be gentler than I’ll remember. Several seconds will pass before you’ll say, “Wow. First time I’ve ever seen you away from home. Where’re you living these days?”

“Manhattan,” I’ll say.

“Oh. The big city,” you’ll say, like it’s a truly good thing.

I’ll nod. I won’t ask you anything. I’ll look at you and wait.

Suits of blue, black, gray, and tan will dodge and whoosh past us in both directions. Heels clicking on concrete, huffs and impatient scoffs; we’ll be in the way.

I’ll shield my eyes with one hand and be silent for so long it’ll feel impolite. You’ll hold a cheap gray suit jacket over one shoulder, your white collared shirt bearing sweat marks under the arms. You’ll smell of Obsession For Men, alluring and more sophisticated than the Old Spice I used to notice at the bus stop during high school, when you rarely spoke to me. Your chest will be broad and you’ll be slim, like me, which will mean something, because twenty-one years earlier we were chubby six-year-olds foraging together for Ding Dongs and Oreos my mother hid deep in the pantry so we wouldn’t overeat. We’d find them, and eat them all, and that thrill was a bond we shared.

But being connoisseurs of Nabisco Cookies and Hostess Snack Cakes, and being buddies from the time we could crawl, never made our bond as strong as the one you shared with every kid in the neighborhood but me.

Someone’ll bump into you and you’ll fall into me and grab my arm before I lose my balance on the top step.

“Sorry. You alright?” you’ll ask.

I’ll say, “Fine, thanks.” And take my arm back.

That day, twenty-one years after I lost you, I’ll be wearing a tomato-red kufi atop unapologetically kinky hair —wild kinks I tamed the soul out of when I lived across the street from you, hoping straight hair would make me pretty, and more like everyone else. But you called me an ugly, bubble-butted nigger at the bus stop. Elementary school became junior high, which turned into high school and I barely existed. You had all those years to speak to me. That day I’ll wonder, why now?

I’ll have on black chunky boots and a dress that’s lime-green, like LifeSavers candies. Red, black, and green are Pan-African colors and I’ll wear them because at the time, I’ll be mad and militant, saying fuck you to you and everyone else from home who said my color, my hair, and my big butt made me ugly. That day at the Path Station it won’t matter to me that you were only a boy when you said those things.

I won’t smile. I won’t be warm. I’ll forget any mean things I may have said back at the bus stop. I probably said some, because I will remember how you winced at the mention of your fat mom, crippled father, and port-wine stain birth-marked baby sister. My tongue, sharpened on figurative and literal sticks and stones hurled at me by neighborhood bullies must have pierced your soft spots sometimes, too. Yet you’ll look at me that day with a tenderness that insists cruel words never passed between us.

Your dark hair will be short. Your skin clean-shaven, clear, the spots of adolescence healed and faded. Your face will flush and your eyes will brighten the way they used to shine when you were my round-cheeked running buddy. You’ll look deep into me with such warmth that against my will you’ll begin to melt the icicles that numbed me inside.

My name, when you say it, will sound like songs from playtimes past. In your eyes I’ll catch a glimpse of us singing on swings, flying above the grass where we found four-leaf clovers. You’ll invite me into a little chamber of your heart where you saved us. But I won’t go. I won’t be ready to remember how to get there.

There’ll be no mention of what happened to us, or what didn’t happen that should have. You’ll sing my name again, a young boy’s sweetness shining out of your grown man’s face and you’ll say, “You were my first best friend.”

I’ll know you’re telling me you’re sorry. You didn’t mean to hurt me. You were just a kid.

I’ll nod politely and shrug off your words of apology. I’ll carry my bubble-butt and my baggage down the stairs, catch my train and move on with my life.

In another twenty-one years, I’ll be middle aged and softer inside and out, the rough edges of resentment worn down with experience. I’ll remember how you said my name that day and the way you looked at me with affection. I’ll transport myself back to the Path station, in front of the stairs, trains rumbling below, bodies whooshing by, and I’ll be kinder to you. I will. Because by then I’ll know that love is the only feeling left once enough time has passed.

Flannery O’Conner Awardee Toni Ann Johnson photo by Rachael Warecki

Toni Ann Johnson is the winner of the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. Her linked short story collection Light Skin Gone to Waste will be published by the University of Georgia Press in the fall of 2022. Johnson’s novel, Remedy for a Broken Angel was released in 2014 and nominated for a 2015 NAACP iImage award for Outstanding Literary Work by a Debut Author. A novella, Homegoing , won Accents Publishing’s inaugural novella contest and was released in May of 2021. Her short stories have appeared in The Coachella Review, Hunger Mountain, Callaloo Journal, and many other publications.