In February 2026, Screen Door Press, an imprint of the University Press of Kentucky, will publish the linked short story collection ‘But Where’s Home’ by Toni Ann Johnson. Winner of the 2024 Screen Door Press Fiction Prize, the book follows Johnson’s previous collection, ‘Light Skin Gone to Waste’, a 2023 NAACP Image Award nominee for Outstanding Literary Work, and winner of the 2021 Flannery O’Connor Award.
Deeply emotional, funny, and unflinchingly honest, ‘But Where’s Home?’ lays bare the realities of Black life in America, confronting issues of racism and classism as well as narcissistic abuse and parent-child relationships.
The Arringtons are an affluent Black family residing in a picturesque, predominantly white town. Through multiple perspectives that span from the 1960s to 2022, readers are invited into their sometimes painful and often humorous lives. The daughters, Livia and Maddie, must find ways to survive their narcissistic parents. Their father, a practicing psychologist, has affairs with white women in the town. Their mother is volatile, dealing with infidelity while trying to raise daughters in a place that rejects them.
The complex and interwoven characters of Toni Ann Johnson’s collection, ‘But Where’s Home?‘, create a kaleidoscope of truths about human nature and the United States’ complicated relationship with race.
Rickey Fayne, author of ‘The Devil Three Times’ says Toni “has tapped into something primal”, and Deesha Philyaw, author of ‘The Secret Lives of Church Ladies’ says the book is an “honest look at what a mess our parents can make––of themselves, us, and each other––and how some of us survive, in spite of them.”
We had the opportunity to speak with the acclaimed author to do a deep dive into the themes of her book, and the role she envisions her book playing in today’s political climate.
When did you begin writing ‘But Where’s Home?’ and what prompted the idea for this book?
The stories in ‘But Where’s Home?’ were originally part of my previous book, ‘Light Skin Gone to Waste’ (2022), as was the novella ‘Homegoing’, published in 2021. It was, at one point, one long book presented as a novel in stories about the Arringtons, a Black family living in a mostly white town in NY State, based on my own family’s experience.
The oldest stories, written when I was in graduate school from 2006—2008, focused on Maddie (based on me) and became ‘Light Skin Gone to Waste’. Maddie’s isolation as a Black girl in a mostly white environment, dealing with parents who lacked empathy for her experience, was the primary inspiration. During my MFA program, I read the linked collections ‘Drown’ by Junot Diaz, and ‘The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fist Fight in Heaven’, by Sherman Alexie, and these books provided a model for how I could approach my own linked collection.
I started writing the stories that became ‘But Where’s Home?’ in 2016, after an agent read an early version of ‘Light Skin Gone to Waste’, which originally focused mostly (though not entirely) on Maddie. I was advised to bring in more points of view. From 2016—2020, I added stories from multiple POVs that hadn’t been explored in the original story collection. When the long version of the book didn’t sell, I took those newer stories out, and I was fortunate to win The Flannery O’Connor Award, which resulted in the publication of Light Skin Gone to Waste.
The new books as it exists now, ‘But Where’s Home?’, began taking shape in 2023 when I revisited the stories I had to cut from LSGTW. I wrote a few additional stories to make sure the book could stand on its own without requiring readers to have read the previous books. I also considered what I wanted the overall theme to be, and that became an exploration of the meaning of home. What is it? Where is it? How does one find or create it? All the stories touch upon this in one way or another.
Your previous work examined racism in American suburbia, and this new book also includes themes of racism and classism, among others. Why is it important for you to interweave these topics into your stories?
I write about events and situations my family and I experienced in the town of Monroe, NY. Racism and classism were part of the experience because we were upper-middle-class Black people in a town that had a mostly white, mostly working-class population. While there were some professionals and families who were well-off and even rich, most were working-class.
At the time I was growing up there, in the 1960s and 70s, despite living in a nice home, traveling abroad every summer, and being the daughter of a highly educated professional, I was regarded as second-class by people I went to school with and by kids in my neighborhood, because I was not white. I was called the N-word, and at times, students and teachers alike made incorrect assumptions about me based on the dominant culture’s preferred image of Black people as poor, criminally inclined, and intellectually and culturally inferior.
I had to prove that I was none of those things, which was demoralizing and exhausting. These experiences became part of me, and the particular race/class dynamic began showing up in my work decades ago, though I wasn’t immediately conscious of why.
I’m intrigued by the false assumptions the dominant culture makes about Black people when there’s no curiosity about Black lives outside of poverty and struggle. There’s a long history of successful Black families in this country, but in my experience, most white people are unfamiliar with the history of the Black middle class and the Black elite.
The TV show ‘The Gilded Age’ is introducing many Americans to this history for the first time. Racist ideas about Black potential persist, and the dominant culture’s effort to dehumanize Black people of all classes continues. I think it’s important to write about these things from a Black point of view because we can share common experiences, create a record of them, expand awareness to those who aren’t aware of our varying experiences and perspectives, and ultimately, writing about these topics contributes to the culture.
Do you draw from real life experiences?
Absolutely. Most of the events in my last three books have some basis in real experience. Real people are altered because I write fiction, but the stories are inspired by real events.
How do you balance or blur the line between fiction and reality to create your characters and storylines?
I use a mixture of memory, family lore, and imagination to create fictionalized versions of real experiences. For example, the opening story of the collection ‘But Where’s Home?’ takes place in the spiritual realm. Obviously, that’s fiction. Maddie is narrating from before she’s born. However, the circumstances she’s revealing about her chosen family are inspired by the facts of my own family.
Can you talk a bit about the relevance and timeliness of ‘But Where’s Home?’ in today’s socio-political climate?
‘But Where’s Home?’ looks at some of the ways racism presented itself—limitations intentionally placed on Black people—over multiple decades. There are overt examples, like people throwing eggs and rocks at the Arringtons when they move into a white neighborhood. And more covert examples, like a real estate agent surreptitiously trying to thwart the sale of a house the Arringtons want to buy, or educators treating a Black character coldly in comparison to her white classmates.
Blatant forms of racism are obviously happening today in 2026 to Black people and currently to anyone who isn’t white. Shamelessly racist people are in power and doing all they can to wipe out any progress toward racial equity and a multi-racial democracy. The experiences in the book, whether they take place in the 1960s or the 2000s, are still relevant and will continue to be because they’re still with us.
As I say in the book, “all of time is happening now, and then, and it’s also yet to come.” We’re connected to what came before us—our history shapes our present, and the present shapes our future, and they’re inextricably linked.
Your main characters also deal with narcissistic parents and complex child-parent relationships. Why was this family dynamic important to explore for you?
Because my parents could be case studies for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Surviving the narcissistic family is an intense experience and one that requires a rebuilding of self. When there’s no emotional comfort or empathy and the narcissistic abuse continues unabated, it breaks a person.
But there’s hope. The adult child of narcissists has to eventually stop longing for the parents she wishes for and parent herself with kindness and compassion. The daughters in But Where’s Home? find ways to recover, to rebuild themselves, and to thrive. I think the experience of surviving narcissism is not unlike the experience of surviving racism.
There’s gaslighting and a lack of empathy in both situations. Black people have had to become realistic about the wish for white America to see our humanity. We’ve found ways to thrive despite our country’s lack of validation. And people who survive have to develop a strong sense of their own worth despite efforts of the abuser to break them down and make them hate themselves.
Survivors of both forms of abuse (racism and narcissism), despite their suffering, are prone to becoming astonishingly strong. As a survivor of narcissism, my strength comes from self-love. As a survivor of racism, my strength comes from self-love combined with love for Black people. Racism wanted me to hate myself and us, and instead, it taught me to love us fiercely.
What were the most challenging or confronting aspects of writing from Livia and Maddie’s perspective, vs Velma?
Livia was a challenge because she’s the character whose privacy I was most ardent about protecting. She was also a challenge because there’s a lot of resentment on that character’s part for Maddie, who’s based on me. That said, I loved writing from Livia’s POV. Putting myself in her shoes, I understood her frustration and felt deeply for her.
I also love writing from Velma’s POV. Though she’s a cruel character in many respects, her voice is fun to write; even when she’s being mean or crazy, she can be funny and entertaining. Her voice has bite to it, and I appreciate that.
One major challenge I had was that my own mother, on whom Velma is based, had a lot of shame surrounding her origin story. She didn’t want it revealed. I waited until she was in her nineties to publish these books so that few, if any, people would be left who’d be in a position to judge her family history. I decided that her character would be more of a monster if the reader did not have a window into her childhood trauma. Her cruelty comes from her own unresolved pain. I thought it was essential to include that to be fair to her character.
Why are complex female characters, especially women of color, a necessity in literature and storytelling?
In my opinion, it’s important because historically, Black women’s inner lives were rarely explored. We weren’t often fully rounded as characters until Black women began writing about themselves.
A work of literature that I greatly admire is Alice Randall’s ‘The Wind Done Gone’, which parodies Margaret Mitchell’s ‘Gone with the Wind’. Its protagonist, Cynara, is Scarlett O’Hara’s mixed-race half-sister. Exploring the life and interiority of a Black woman from Margaret Mitchell’s world is a triumph as I see it. Black women have always been complex since we’ve been here, and since before Black people arrived here, because we’re human. Human beings are complex.
And Black women are not a monolith. While we share the experience of not being white in a white supremacist culture, our experiences vary beyond that, and it’s important for all of our experiences as Black women to contribute to the literary landscape. Our literature ends up defining us beyond our personal stories that only our families carry forward. If we don’t write about our lives and all their complexities, the truth of who we are will be unavailable.
At a time when women’s stories and historical contributions are being erased by the Trump administration, how can books like yours become a lifeline into different lived experiences and a kind of education in today’s world?
I love this question. I began writing about my family’s experience because I’d not seen it anywhere in literature. Being Black and upper-middle-class in a white, working-class world didn’t seem to exist. It’s certainly a “different lived experience,” and I wanted there to be a record of it.
People might assume that a Black psychologist could not succeed in a predominantly white community, especially one that wasn’t always hospitable, but as it turned out, one did. If I didn’t write about this, no one would know or remember, except for people who knew us. Our family existed, and my stories are a way of leaving a trace of our existence.
You can order a copy of ‘But Where’s Home?’ now and join the author at one of her in-person events from February through June across the U.S. Follow Toni Ann Johnson on Instagram and Facebook.
