Images courtesy of Hayley O’Malley and reproduced with the permission of the Estate of Kathleen Collins.

It is a stitched composition notebook in a classic style: speckled, with a black-and-white cover. Burnished by time, it’s also patterned by a network of surface fissures, corrugated marks, and mottled shapes yellowing to gold. At some point the notebook appears to have been bent back on itself—crushed, perhaps, in the bottom of a bag or a drawer. I can only make out some of the words written on the front in blue ballpoint: “NOVEL,” confident in capitals, and what I’m pretty sure is the year “1974.”

The notebook belongs to Kathleen Collins, the Black American writer, filmmaker, teacher, and activist whose body of creative work was mostly unpublished and unproduced prior to her death from cancer, at forty-six years of age, in 1988. Beginning with the long-delayed 2015 theatrical release of her feature film, the 1982 independent drama Losing Ground, Collins’s work has found the broad public audience it didn’t during her lifetime. Her posthumous acclaim has been secured largely through the work of her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, who, as a nineteen-year-old in 1988, gathered her mother’s papers from her house and stashed them in a large trunk. They stayed there for many years until she felt ready to sort through them.

When she did, it was a revelation. Nina discovered a trove of typewritten manuscripts, including dozens of short stories, plays, and screenplays, in which her mother composed sharply observed fictions of Black middle-class life. Those manuscripts now form the spine of Collins’s official archive at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library; they’re also the basis of the two published volumes of Collins’s writing that Nina edited, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? (2016) and Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary (2019).

The notebook in question is now housed at the Schomburg, but it was not, in fact, among the papers in Nina’s trunk. Instead, it was received by Nina as a surprise gift from a stranger who appeared—and just as swiftly disappeared—in the crowded foyer of New York City’s Lincoln Center on a wintry evening in February 2015, at the premiere of Losing Ground. Nina was approached by an older Black gentleman she didn’t recognize. “You should have this,” he said to her, and passed her a manila folder—which, Nina later discovered, contained the notebook. The man slipped away before Nina was able to get his name; his identity remains unknown. Their encounter feels as though it might have been lifted from one of Collins’s fictions, which stage many unlikely or uncanny meetings among old lovers, friends, and strangers, so improbable they feel arranged.

Inside the notebook are notes and drafts toward a novel with the working title “Blue Obstacles.” Its palimpsestic, coffee-muddled pages offer a rare and precious example of Collins’s exploratory writing and revision process, as she transforms evocative phrases and scenic fragments into drafts of the first four chapters of a novel. Mildred, a Black American woman in her early twenties living in Paris, embarks on an affair with a poet. She finds in the “damp clutter” of the poet’s rooms a temporary refuge from her painful upbringing in New Jersey, even as her passionate affair with him compounds the anxiety and self-consciousness that is her childhood inheritance. The past presses on the present as the unfinished novel shuttles between scenes of Mildred in France and as a young teen in New Jersey, enduring years in the morbid shadow of her father’s job as a mortician out of the family home.

Mildred shares much of her biography with Collins. Like her protagonist, Collins grew up in New Jersey, with a father who worked as a mortician; she also lived in Paris with her first husband, Douglas Collins, for a couple of years in early adulthood. Begun during a season of personal upheaval, which included the breakdown of her marriage toward the end of 1974, “Blue Obstacles” seems to have initiated a decade-long effort by Collins to work through and make sense of her relationship with Douglas and her early life.

Across numerous complete and incomplete projects—including “Scapegoat Child,” a 1979 story republished in 2018 in The Paris Review that narrates scenes of domestic violence also found in “Blue Obstacles”—Collins used her fiction as a form of autofictional memory work. She needed, as she wrote in one of the fragmentary sections in the notebook, to “measure carefully every particle that lingers in my memory. Weigh it. Sift it. Suck it out of the corners. Till it sits idly swaying. Like a pool of water inside a globe.” Even in its drafty, fragmentary form, Collins’s meta-artistic reflection on her novel-writing is representative of the striking, poignant prose that characterizes her most mature work.

“Blue Obstacles” is also an object lesson in the value of unfinished writing. A repository for new aesthetic pleasures and narrative possibilities, the archive of unfinished works  prompts us to reconsider the literary past as a story of creative process—a story in which “completion” or publication is not the only measure of artistic achievement. To return to and reappraise women’s incomplete works, in particular, can be to resist the exclusionary gestures—the refusals, rejections, and roadblocks—that all too often stymie and limit the public careers of marginalized authors. Collins, for one, was a prodigious talent whose difficulties in getting her work published and produced were not merely a matter of bad luck or bad timing but also reflected the insistent and myopic whiteness of the literary culture she negotiated.

No complete draft of the work that originated as “Blue Obstacles” has yet been discovered. But there’s good reason to believe that the notebook materials represent the early drafts of a novel that would later carry the title “Treatment for a Colored Movie.” We know that Collins submitted the full manuscript of this novel to Random House in 1978, where it landed on the desk of Toni Morrison, then working as an editor for the press. Morrison thought the manuscript “stunning,” according to Random House’s files, but the book was not published by that press or any other. The manuscript appears to be lost, at least for now. In its place is “Blue Obstacles.”

You can read an excerpt from “Blue Obstacles” on the Daily here.

Alix Beeston is a writer and scholar based at Cardiff University. She is the coeditor of Women, Sisters, and Friends, a volume of Kathleen Collins’s plays and screenplays to be published by the University of California Press in 2027. A longer excerpt from “Blue Obstacles” will appear in ASAP/Journal.