Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • The Paris Review

    Notes from Kathleen Collins’s Diary

    by Kathleen Collins Feb 08, 2019 10 minutes

    When the writer and filmmaker Kathleen Collins died in 1988 at age forty-six, her level of fame was disproportionate to the heights of her talent. With a singing, singular voice, she wrote stories of black women in and out of love. The release in 2016 of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? introduced her pioneering work to twenty-first-century readers. Now, Ecco has released Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary, a delightful grab bag of Collins’s letters, plays, film scripts, journal entries, stories, and chapters of an unfinished novel. Below, Collins revisits her diary and reflects on the nature of writing, loving, and living.

    Kathleen Collins. Photo: Douglas Collins.

    November 19
    It rained hard today. After lunch I sat in the kitchen sipping a can of beer. The beer made me very sleepy, so I came in to take a nap. It was one of those deep naps, where the wind and the rain conspire to take you into a deep, secure slumber. Every muscle goes limp. You awaken, as you awaken sometimes after really good lovemaking: spent, but incredibly rested and content.

    February 8
    Riding in the car, the day was suddenly dreary, bleak. And life seemed monotonous and sad. I wanted to cry. It seems that I have watched enough winters come in, turned the clocks back enough times, watched the rain turn the world black too many days. Only my children really hold me to life. They give me the patience to wait it out for a new day.

    On my desk sits a photograph taken in the ’30s of several young women gathered for some festive occasion.

    You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

    More from The Paris Review

    The Paris Review35 min read
    An Eye In The Throat
    My father answers the phone. He is twenty-three years old, and, as everyone does in the nineties, he picks up the receiver without knowing who is calling. People call all day long, and my parents pick up and say, “Hello?” and then people say, “It’s C
    The Paris Review32 min read
    The Art of Poetry No. 116
    Alice Notley lives in a studio apartment up a single flight of stairs, on the Right Bank in Paris. Her front door is labeled with her name, in looped handwriting on Scotch tape. The small kitchen, which I saw used only for the making of espresso, lea
    The Paris Review1 min read
    Farah Al Qasimi
    Farah Al Qasimi’s first photographs were of the dreary New Haven winter: reflections in water, a dead cat, an angry dog. She was an undergraduate at the Yale School of Art, where in 2017 she also received her M.F.A. Since then, Al Qasimi has turned h

    Related