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• Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?: Stories (Art of the Story) - December 6, 2016 Ecco; 1st edition, https://www.amazon.com/Whatever-Happened-Interracial-Love-Stories/dp/006248415X

• Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Kathleen-Collins/e/B01MYTA01V/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

  Kathleen Collins was a pioneer African American playwright, filmmaker, civil rights activist, film editor, and educator. Her film Losing Ground is one of the first features made by a black woman in America, and is an extremely rare narrative portrayal of a black female intellectual. Collins died in 1988 at the age of forty-six.

• Kathleen Collins - http://kathleencollins.org/about/

  KATHLEEN COLLINS
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  Biography in Brief

  Born in 1942, raised in Jersey City, and educated at Skidmore and the Sorbonne, Kathy Collins was an activist with SNCC during the Civil Rights Movement who went on to carve out a career for herself as a playwright and filmmaker during a time when black women were rarely seen in those roles. She was married twice, and had two children who she raised in Piermont, New York. She died young, at age 46, from breast cancer. Her most known work is the film Losing Ground, followed perhaps by two plays, In the Midnight Hour, and The Brothers. A never-before released collection of short fiction, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, will be published by Ecco Press in Fall, 2016.
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  Extended Biography

  Kathleen Conwell Collins Prettyman (March 18, 1942– September 18, 1988) was born to Frank and Loretta Conwell and lived at 357 Pacific Avenue in Jersey City, NJ. Her father worked first as a mortician and later became the principal of a Jersey City K-8 school (now named after him). He later went on to become the first New Jersey African- American state legislator. Her maternal family (her mother’s maiden name was Pierce) came from Gouldtown, NJ, a 300-year-old settlement — still in existence — that started with an interracial marriage and remained a haven for mixed-race marriages through the 20th century.

  At fifteen, Conwell won first prize at an annual poetry reading contest at Rutgers Newark College of Arts and Sciences for her rendition of Walt Whitman’s “A Child Goes Forth” and “I Learned My Lesson Complete.” An article in the March 3, 1958 Jersey Journal reported that in addition to working as assistant editor of the Lincoln High School’s publication the Leader, Conwell was on the editorial staff of the school yearbook, the Quill; a member of the National Honors Society; and a past secretary of the Student Council.

  After graduating in 1959, she went to the all-women Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY where a few weeks after arrival, Conwell became the class president. Her major was French and she listed her loves as New York City and theater. In the summer of 1961, she spent seven weeks in the République du Congo with the Operation-Crossroads Africa Project—helping to build a youth center in the small village of Mouyundzi, and this is where she first met Douglas Collins, the man who would become her first husband.

  A watershed in her life occurred in the spring of 1962 when two leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Charles Sherrod and Charles Jones, visited her campus. Arriving on campus with Sherrod and Jones was Peggy Dammond (now Preacely) from Harlem.

  That summer the two friends traveled with other college students to work as field workers to register black voters in Lee County as part of SNCC’s Southwest Georgia Project. They were lucky to be staying with Mama Dolly Raines, who was considered the mother of the Albany Movement and worked closely with Charles Sherrod.

  Collins, along with Dammond, Penny Patch and Prathia Hall canvassed door-to-door in Terrell County, urging black residents to register to vote and taking them to the county courthouse to help them do so. They also spoke at the county churches to urge others to do the same. As part of the Albany Movement, Conwell was arrested twice–once for refusing to stop praying with six others on the steps of City Hall. The day after she and others spoke at the Mount Olive Church in Terrell County in Georgia, white supremacists burned the church to the ground.

  Kathleen’s first two days under arrest were spent in the Albany jail. ‘The women’s cell overlooked an open latrine. It was hot, ventilation was poor and there were 10 of us in a cell meant to hold four. The place was crawling with vermin.’ Kathleen was transferred to the Leesburg Stockade, about 11 miles from Albany. Kathleen said that in Leesburg 59 women were crowded in a cell 25 feet long and 10 feet wide and given two meals a day. Breakfast consisted of chicory and cold grits. Supper consisted of one fried egg, black-eye peas, corn bread and water. They were allowed no books. Their time was spent singing freedom songs and hymns, praying and playing cards with a smuggled-in deck... They used part of the time to teach other prisoners about civil rights and voting registration."
  —The Jersey Journal, September 1962

  Conwell returned to Jersey City in September of 1962 and spoke to an overflowing crowd of 700 at the Mt. Pisgah A.M.E. Church, urging the congregation (according to the September 25, 1962 Hudson Dispatch) “to spurn ‘hatred...and learn to love’ those who oppress them, both in the south as well as the north because ‘we believe in God...who will open the doors and break down the walls of segregation.’”

  She told the congregation about a white student who was arrested with them and offered a deal by the deputy sheriff to be let out on bail. When he refused to desert his friends the town sheriff threw the young man into a cell with some of the town’s “riff-raff,” shouting: “Here’s a ni--er-lover—let him have it!” The boy sustained a broken jaw and three broken ribs, but later simply told Conwell that it was just “one of our occupational hazards.” She spoke about a second boy who had been chased by a truck and across a field before he was being beaten unmercifully.

  The Jersey Journal praised Conwell’s eloquence and oratory, and reported that the congregation was brought to tears by “a slip of a girl whose vocation is not the pulpit, but maybe it should be.” Conwell “tearfully appealed for justice for her race, appealed to the heart of humanity for the recognition of the Negro as a child of God, as a man with a bleeding heart in a world that hasn’t cared.”

  In 2002, civil rights activist Ralph Allen recalled hearing Collins use the words “I have a dream” in the prayer service that day. Although there is no established origin for the phrase made famous by Reverend Martin Luther King — he first used it in a speech in November of that year — historians cite three possible sources. One of them is Kathleen Collins.

  During her college years, Conwell wrote thoughtful editorials for the school paper (The Skidmore News), including a history of SNCC and think pieces on Africa, Red China, discrimination, freedom of the press and the United Nations. They were all about creating a better world — one that she was already trying to change with little regard for her personal safety. Conwell graduated from Skidmore in 1963 with a BA in Philosophy and Religion.

  After graduating Skidmore, Kathleen taught high school French in Newton, MA and attended graduate school at Harvard at night. In 1965, she won a John Whitney Hay scholarship, enabling her to pursue her masters in French literature through the Middlebury program at the Sorbonne in Paris. She took a course at there on the adaptation of literature into film, which ignited her interest in cinema.

  In 1966, after getting her degree, she returned to the US and joined NET, the New York City public broadcasting network, working on such programs as American Dream Machine, The Fifty-First State and Black Journal. She trained under John Carter, one of the first black editors to join the union. He thought Kathleen had real talent and he helped her get her union card in an astonishing three years. After NET, she worked as an editor for the BBC, Craven Films, Belafonte Enterprises, Bill Jersey Productions, William Greaves Productions, and the United States Information Agency.

  On her own, Kathleen began writing stories. She wrote her first screenplay in 1971, but later remembered, "Nobody would give any money to a black woman to direct a film. It was probably the most discouraging time of my life.”

  By 1974, she had married and divorced Douglas Collins; had two children, Nina and Emilio; and was working as a professor of film history and screenwriting at the City College of New York. In the following two years she also worked as assistant director for the Broadway musicals “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” (Gilbert Moses directing) and “The Wiz” (Geoffrey Holder) as well as on Lincoln Center’s “Black Picture Show,” which was written and directed by Bill Gunn. In the fall of 1976, Joseph Papp directed a workshop of Collins’s and composer Michael D. Minard’s musical “Portrait of Katherine” at the Public Theatre. This play was later performed as “Almost Music.”

  One of her City College students, Ronald K. Gray, encouraged her to direct her own films. Collins was now living now in Piermont, NY (besides her work at CCNY, she was also teaching French at the Green Meadow School in Spring Valley), and she chose to adapt a short story collection, The Cruz Chronicles by her friend and nearby South Nyack resident, Henry H. Roth, for her first film. It was very much a local affair. The composer for the film who worked with her on “Almost Music,” Michael D. Minard, was sharing Roth’s house at the time and associate producer Eleanor Charles came from Spring Valley. Charles also scouted locations for the shoot in nearby areas of Rockland County.

  The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy started with an initial investment of a mere $5,000 from friends plus a line of credit from DuArt Labs. The 1980 film, which chronicled the adventures of three Puerto Rican brothers scraping by while contending with the ghost of their dead father, eventually won First Prize at the prestigious Sinking Creek Film Festival. Collins’s decision to make a film on a Latino subject bothered some critics, but she felt she needed some distance from her own world for her first film. When asked later in life if she thought that black and women filmmakers had an obligation to address issues relating to race and gender, she replied, “I think you have an even greater obligation to deal with your own obsessions.” Talking about the experience of making The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy, she recalled, “It was a terribly hard film. It was awful doing a movie for $5,000. It was like going down a terribly long tunnel... But we did it. And we did it because Ronald [Gray] and I were really very good partners and have remained very good partners. We both have an incredible tenacity.”

  The film was shot in 1979 in Rockland County, NY, with most locations centered in the riverside town of Piermont. The brothers’ run-down house still stands (now in much better condition) on the dead-end part of Paradise Avenue, a quiet lane that runs parallel to the winding Sparkill Creek, which also appears in the film. Collins wasn’t the only one who found her hometown of Piermont cinematically interesting — in 1983 Woody Allen used it as his Depression-era backdrop for The Purple Rose of Cairo.

  The cast was comprised of local New York actors known mostly for their theater work. The Cruz brothers were played by Randy Ruiz, who had been in Elizabeth Swados’s Broadway musical, “Runaways;” Lionel Pina, who had previously appeared in Dog Day Afternoon, Marathon Man and a PBS series, Watch Your Mouth; and Jose Machado, who was in The Goodbye Girl and Robert Young’s movie Short Eyes. Jose Aybar, of nearby Haverstraw, sang the film’s theme song, “Somos Hermanos.” The only non-local exception was Californian Sylvia Field, who portrayed Miss Malloy. Even Field had a local connection — her son-in-law Mike Kellin was Henry H. Roth’s South Nyack neighbor. Although Field’s long film career dated back to 1928, audiences knew her best as Mrs. Wilson on the Dennis the Menace television series.

  Collins, who was the recipient of writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1982 and 1983 a finalist for the Susan Blackburn International Prize for Playwriting, always considered herself a writer first. But it was a filmmaker, Haile Gerima, who introduced Collins to the author who most influenced her work — Lorraine Hansberry, the playwright of “A Raisin in the Sun.”

  My first commitment is actually to writing and the form that that takes is really largely dependent on what’s on my mind. I’ve been writing now for almost 20 years... So when I first start something, I always go to the typewriter... The older I get, I have this feeling of being very connected with Lorraine Hansberry. I’ve never found another black writer who I felt was asking the same questions I was asking until I started reading her work... And the fact that she was able to encompass this wide range of experience, from Jewish intellectuals to black middle class to Africa—she had a really incredible sense of life that fascinates me. That anything in life was accessible for her to write about... The thing that interests me about her, probably more than anyone else, is her illness. She died very young, and she died basically eaten up. My theory is that she was not only way ahead of her time, but that success came at a time when she was not able to absorb it without its destructive elements eating her body up. — Interview with David Nicholson, Black Film Review, Winter 1988/89 Hansberry must have been very much on Collins’ mind because the filmmaker fell ill after completing The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy.

  My basic premise is that illness is psychic disconnection of some kind. And I had a period of time when I was ill. I still have to struggle with it. The nature of illness and female success and the capacity of the female to acknowledge its own intelligence is a subject that interests me a lot... I had just finished a first movie, and knew that I had it, knew that I had the talent. Knew that my own creative power was finally surfacing, that all the years of working quietly, and quite alone, were beginning to pay off. It was basically a four-year cycle, which I’m just coming out of. When I did The Cruz Brothers, I knew I had something. It was 1979 and I was 37. It probably takes that long to mature...

  — Interview with David Nicholson, Black Film Review, Winter 1988/89
  Collins’s next film, Losing Ground, followed in 1982 and starred Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, and Duane Jones. (Her screenplay, which differs in some significant ways from the film, is included in Screenplays of the African-American Experience, 1991, edited by Phyllis Rauch Klotman.) Collins began filming having initially raised $25,000 of the final production cost of $125,000.

  A comedic drama, Losing Ground was one of the very first fictional features by an African-American woman filmmaker. It tells the story of Sara Rogers, a brilliant and beautiful black philosophy professor (played by Collins’s close friend Seret Scott), and Victor, her outgoing artist husband, at a marital crossroad. When Victor rents a summer country house to celebrate a museum sale, the couple’s summer idyll quickly goes awry. While Victor woos and paints Celia, a lovely local Hispanic girl, Sara pursues her research into the religious and philosophical meaning of ecstatic abandon, and her search to find it in her own life. When she agrees to perform in a student’s thesis film, Sara is charmed by her costar, the charming uncle of the filmmaker. The plot of the student film, a retelling of the song “Frankie and Johnny” mirrors the troubles in Sara’s own marriage. When the crisis in her marriage erupts, Sara’s submerged anger and resentment come out realistically, honestly, and explosively. The film ends with no easy resolutions.

  Losing Ground won First Prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal and garnered some international acclaim but received little notice in the United States.

  During those years of activity in the early 1980s, Collins also produced equally remarkable dramas. Her two most famous plays were part of The Women’s Project. “In the Midnight Hour” (1980) portrayed a middle-class black family at the outset of the civil rights movement, and was directed by Billie Allen, who played the mother in Losing Ground. “The Brothers” (1982) was published in Margaret B. Wilkerson’s Nine Plays by Black Women (1986) and named one of the twelve outstanding plays of the season by the Theatre Communications Group. It delineates the impact of racism and sexism on a middle-class black family from 1948 to 1968 as articulated by six intelligent, witty, and strikingly different women. The brothers themselves, though never seen, are vibrant presences through the women’s remarks. “The Brothers” was produced at the American Place Theater and featured many familiar faces from Losing Ground. Billie Allen directed, the music was once again by Michael D. Minard, Duane Jones performed three roles (he was also Assistant Stage Manager), and Seret Scott was also in the cast.

  Themes frequently explored in Collins’s work are issues of marital malaise, male dominance and impotence, and freedom of expression and intellectual pursuit. Her protagonists are cited as “typically self-reflective women who move from a state of subjugation to empowerment.”

  In 1983, Collins reconnected with Alfred Prettyman, whom she had known twenty years earlier in her SNCC days. They married four years later at her home in Nyack, NY with only family in attendance. Prettyman, a philosopher and publisher, was also the head of the Society for the Study of Africana Philosophy (SSAP), based in New York City. SSAP is a forum for the discussion of philosophical ideas. It was established to provide a network of support for young African American philosophers and other intellectuals and to bring alternative voices to re-center the predominantly Eurocentric focus of and lack of diversity in most academic philosophy departments.

  One week after their marriage, she learned that she had metastasized breast cancer. Collins kept this information to herself over the next year. She did not even tell her children of her illness until it was impossible to conceal it any longer.

  At the time of her death in 1988, Collins left behind many projects including the screenplay, “Conversations with Julie;” a film musical she wrote with Michael D. Minard entitled “A Summer Diary;” her sixth stage play, “Waiting for Jane;” and an unfinished draft of her first novel, Lollie: A Suburban Tale. She was just 46 years old. One of the first black American women to produce a feature-length film, she is considered to have “changed the face and content of the black womanist film.” Collins’s work is significant in that it conveys images of people of color, particularly women, in ways that even now are rarely seen in popular culture. She challenged stereotypes and explored the interlocking oppressions of gender, race, and class.

  Copyright © 2016. Nina Lorez Collins - All Rights Reserved.

• Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Collins

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  Kathleen Collins
  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Kathleen Collins (March 18, 1942 – September 18, 1988) (also known as Kathleen Conwell, Kathleen Conwell Collins or Kathleen Collins Prettyman) was an African-American playwright, writer, filmmaker, director, civil rights activist, and educator from Jersey City, New Jersey. Her two feature narratives—The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy (1980) and Losing Ground (1982)—furthered the range of Black women's films. Although Losing Ground was denied large-scale exhibition, it was among the first films created by a Black woman deliberately designed to tell a story intended for popular consumption, with a feature-length narrative structure.[1] Collins thus paved the way for Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust (1991) to become the first feature-length narrative film created by a Black woman to be placed in commercial distribution. Influenced by Lorraine Hansberry, she wrote about "African Americans as human subjects and not as mere race subjects" [emphasis in the original].[2]

  Contents [hide]
  1 Background
  2 Career
  2.1 Posthumous accomplishments
  3 Personal life
  4 References
  5 External links
  Background[edit]
  Born to Loretta (née Pierce) and Frank Conwell and raised in New Jersey, Kathleen, at the age of 15,

  "won first prize at an annual poetry reading contest at Rutgers Newark College of Arts and Sciences for her rendition of Walt Whitman's 'A Child Goes Forth' and 'I Learned My Lesson Complete'. An article in the March 3, 1958 Jersey Journal reported that in addition to working as assistant editor of the Lincoln High School's publication the Leader, Conwell was on the editorial staff of the school yearbook, the Quill; a member of the National Honors Society; and a past secretary of the Student Council."[3]

  After graduating from high school in 1959, Collins went to Skidmore College, where she received a BA in philosophy and religion in 1963. In 1962, after her campus was visited by two leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she became active in the Civil Rights Movement, canvassing in Georgia for black residents to register to vote; as a result, she was arrested twice while working with the Albany Movement.[3][4][5]

  After she graduated from Skidmore, she taught high-school French in Newton, MA, while attending graduate school at Harvard at night. In 1965, she won a scholarship to study in France at Paris-Sorbonne University, where, in 1966, she obtained an MA in French literature and cinema.[3][4]

  Career[edit]
  Collins joined the faculty of City College at the City University of New York and became a professor of film history and screenwriting, where cinematographer Ronald Gray encouraged her to go ahead with a screenplay she had adapted from a Henry Roth short story. That film became The Cruz Brothers and Mrs. Malloy, which eventually won First Prize at the Sinking Creek Film Festival. This was followed in 1982 by Losing Ground (starring Seret Scott, Bill Gunn, and Duane Jones), which she wrote and directed. Losing Ground was the first feature-length drama directed by a black American woman[6] and won First Prize at the Figueroa International Film Festival in Portugal, garnering much international acclaim. Both films were shot in Rockland County, New York, and are currently distributed by Milestone Films.[7]

  Collins wrote many other plays and screenplays, but her two most well-known theatrical plays are In the Midnight Hour (1981) and The Brothers (1982), both of which are available through Samuel French. Themes frequently explored in her work are issues of marital malaise, male dominance and impotence, freedom of expression and intellectual pursuit, and her protagonists are cited as "typically self-reflective women who move from a state of subjugation to empowerment."[2]

  Posthumous accomplishments[edit]
  On Collins' abrupt death in 1988, the bulk of her work, most of it unpublished, was left to her daughter, Nina Collins, who in 2006 began to sift through her mother's enormous archive and began working to have it published, re-stored and reissued.

  In 2015 A Public Space posthumously published Collins' short story "Interiors", a fictionalized account of her divorce.[8]

  Collins' 1982 Losing Ground was restored and reissued in 2015.[9] The film had its first theatrical release in 2015 at Film Society of Lincoln Center, opening the series "Tell it like it is: Black Independents in New York, 1968-1986”.[9]

  In December 2016 a short story collection of Collins' work was published under the title Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? The title story was published by Granta in July 2016.[10]

  Personal life[edit]
  Collins was married, but divorced in 1975.[11] She had two children from her marriage: Nina Lorez Collins and Emilio Collins. She was married a second time, to Alfred Prettyman.[12]

  Collins died from breast cancer in 1988 at the age of 46.[13]

  References[edit]
  Jump up ^ Bobo, Jacqueline (1998). black women film and video artists. Routledge. pp. 8–9. ISBN 0-415-92041-8.
  ^ Jump up to: a b Nelson, Emmanuel Sampath (2005). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature: A - C. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 482. ISBN 978-0-313-33060-5. Retrieved August 28, 2012.
  ^ Jump up to: a b c "About", Kathleen Collins website.
  ^ Jump up to: a b Andrews, William L.; Foster, Frances Smith; Harris, Trudier (February 15, 2001). The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Oxford University Press. p. 79. ISBN 978-0-19-513883-2. Retrieved August 28, 2012.
  Jump up ^ Carson, Clayborne (1960). The Student Voice, 1960-1965: Periodical of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 57. ISBN 978-0-88736-323-8. Retrieved 28 August 2012.
  Jump up ^ George, Nelson (2004). Post-Soul Nation: The Explosive, Contradictory, Triumphant, and Tragic 1980s as Experienced by African Americans {Previously Known as Blacks and Before That Negroes}. Viking. p. 37. ISBN 0670032751.
  Jump up ^ "Losing Ground", Milstone Film & Video.
  Jump up ^ Collins, Kathleen. "Interiors". A Public Space. Retrieved September 5, 2016.
  ^ Jump up to: a b "Kathleen Collins’s Lost Masterwork, "Losing Ground"". The New Yorker.
  Jump up ^ Collins, Kathleen (July 13, 2015). "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?". Granta (136: Legacies of Love). Retrieved September 5, 2016.
  Jump up ^ Collins, Nina (March 24, 2013). "The Fighter: Domestic Violence Against Men". Elle. Retrieved September 5, 2016.
  Jump up ^ "Kathleen Collins, a Film Maker, Dies at 46". The New York Times. September 24, 1988. Retrieved September 5, 2016.
  Jump up ^ Lorez Collins, Nina (September 5, 2015). "How Kathleen Collins’s Daughter Kept Her Late Mother’s Career Alive". Vogue. Retrieved 5 September 2016.
  External links[edit]
  Kathleen Collins official website.
  Ashley Clark, "Making ground: remembering Kathleen Collins", Sight & Sound, May 23, 2016.
  Rebecca Williams, "My Mentor, Kathleen Collins, Black Woman Filmmaker", Confessions of a Bathrobe Blogger, January 30, 2015.
  Authority control
  WorldCat Identities VIAF: 169927685 LCCN: no2011039433 GND: 1125563125
  Categories: African-American women writersAmerican women writersAfrican-American writersAfrican-American dramatists and playwrightsAmerican dramatists and playwrightsAfrican-American screenwritersAmerican screenwritersAfrican-American film directorsAmerican film directorsAfrican-American educatorsAmerican educators1942 births1988 deathsSkidmore College alumniUniversity of Paris alumniCity University of New York facultyWriters from Jersey City, New JerseyWomanistsAmerican women dramatists and playwrights20th-century American dramatists and playwrights20th-century women writers
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• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2016/12/03/504244453/daughter-of-african-american-filmmaker-asks-what-happened-to-kathleen-collins

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  Listen· 7:29

  AUTHOR INTERVIEWS
  Daughter Of African-American Filmmaker Asks, What Happened To Kathleen Collins?

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  December 3, 20168:39 AM ET
  Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
  NPR's Scott Simon talks to Nina Collins about a new book of short stories written by her late mother, Kathleen Collins, one of the first African-American filmmakers. The book is called "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?"

  SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

  Much of the world is getting to know the work of Kathleen Collins - all the more to regret that she's not around to hear the praise. Kathleen Collins was a writer and filmmaker who died in 1988 of breast cancer. She was 46 years old.

  Her 1982 film, "Losing Ground," was one of the first features directed by an African-American woman. It never opened in theaters. But last year, the film sold out at Lincoln Center. And now her first collection of short stories has been published, "Whatever Happened To Interracial Love?"

  Stories, almost all of them unpublished in Kathleen Collins' lifetime, have now been collected by her daughter Nina Collins and published by HarperCollins - no relation. Nina Collins, who's been a literary agent and a writer, joins us from New York. Thanks so much for being with us.

  NINA COLLINS: Thank you for having me.

  SIMON: I have to begin by asking - you've worked so hard to bring your mother's work to new attention. But I gather, having read articles you've written over the years, that you didn't feel particularly close to her when you were a child.

  COLLINS: No, I think I did feel really close to her. But I - she was quite preoccupied as a mother. She was - as much as I know, she loved us. She was probably a writer more than she was anything else. And so our childhood was complicated.

  You know, she was a divorced, single, black woman writer-mother. She had no money. And so I think it was hard. And I think she was frequently depressed. And then when she died when I was 19 of an illness that she'd kept a secret for, it turns out, much of my childhood - she first got sick when I was 11, and I didn't know about her cancer until two weeks before she died.

  It was a huge trauma. And I'm probably, you know, still not quite in touch with the anger I feel about it. Or maybe I am. Maybe that's what's come out in all this - in this process and the writing I've done.

  SIMON: Where do these stories come from? Where'd you find them?

  COLLINS: She had remarried shortly before her death. And my stepfather and I didn't get along very well. And so in the aftermath of her death, kind of in the immediate aftermath, I gathered all of her stuff that I could and put it in this trunk - all of her writings and photographs and journals and really whatever I could kind of lay my hands on - and took it with me.

  And then in my mid- to late 30s, I went through a very difficult personal time in my life. And I really needed to understand what my own pain was about in my childhood. And so I took this trunk up. And I opened it up. And I started to read it.

  And, for me, they're probably the most powerful of anything she's done because they're so completely autobiographical. I mean, I recognize pretty much every character setup, every single story I can - you know, I think I know the story behind, to some extent. And so, for me, they were this incredible gift into my mother's life, which I felt I had so many questions about and, you know, not enough answers.

  SIMON: Let me ask about some of the stories. "The Happy Family" - young, white man becomes part of an African-American family that he meets at a civil-rights rally in a church. A romance follows. But go ahead.

  COLLINS: Yeah. That story - you know, I don't know who the white man is in that story. And often, when I read it, I get confused because I think it's my mother telling the story. So my mother met a woman named Peggy Priestley (ph), who's also still alive.

  And it was a very close friend of hers - at a SNCC rally, at a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee rally. And Peggy brought my mother home to her apartment in Harlem, where she lived with her brother and her parents.

  And her brother Hank, her younger brother, my mother fell in love with and had a romance with. And a bunch of years later - maybe eight or nine or 10 years later - Hank killed himself.

  SIMON: Another phrase of your mother's I marked in there - the narrator says, looking at the romance - he says, oh, my God, how life will take them apart.

  COLLINS: Yeah. (Laughter) It's a good line. It's a sad one. And it did. And I don't know. It's interesting. I don't know when she wrote "The Happy Family." Did she write it - she must've written it after Hank died. And he died when I was 2. So she knew that life had taken them apart.

  SIMON: Did life do that to your mother?

  COLLINS: You know, I think the two kind of personal, big sadnesses of her life were her mother's death and I think her trouble with men. Or, at least, her relationship with my father was very problematic. And, you know, larger issues like race and being a black woman artist and trying to have your voice heard and be recognized - I think those were also struggles. But I don't think those things tore her apart. I think it was more kind of the personal pain.

  SIMON: I've read articles you've written, I guess, for Vogue, for Elle. And, you know, at one point, you - not to be oblique about it - you seem to hold your relationship with your mother responsible for some of the problems that you had with violence.

  COLLINS: Yeah. She had a terrible temper. I mean, we would have violent fights when I was a child. She had a real rage in her. There's no doubt. And she and my father fought a lot. It's not as if I saw a lot of domestic violence. There was a lot of yelling and some hitting.

  And I think my response to her death was to kind of do, do, do. So within a couple of years of her death, I got married. I started a business. I had four children. I kind of went in super overdrive through my 20s and into my 30s and, you know, was depressed and saw therapists but never really looked at what was underneath my kind of hyper, you know, almost manic attempt to create a life.

  And then, basically, it kind of crashed down. In my 30s, I went through a very, very difficult divorce. I was extremely angry. I think it was a lot of unexplored anger about her death and the secrets. And yeah, I probably had been raised in an environment where rage was not unusual.

  SIMON: Again, not to be oblique, but you took it out on your then-husband, right?

  COLLINS: Yeah, I did.

  SIMON: Does getting to know your mother through these stories help you close a circle within yourself with your mother?

  COLLINS: It has, I think. I mean, when I got divorced, I was 37. And that's when I started reading all of her work. And I wrote a draft of a memoir. I also went into therapy. And yeah, I mean, I certainly don't feel violent anymore (laughter).

  I'm still sad sometimes. I'm not probably nearly as sad. I mean, this process of bringing her work out is - I mean, it's very emotional. It's extremely sad for me that she doesn't know that this is happening. And it feels like a weird role.

  Like, I'm talking for her. But this is not my work. This is her work. And I'm so pleased that I've done this for her and, really, for the world. I'm so glad her voice is out there for people to enjoy and learn from. But it's certainly bittersweet.

  SIMON: Nina Collins - her mother Kathleen Collins died in 1988. But her first collection of short stories has just been published, "Whatever Happened To Interracial Love?" Nina Collins, thanks so much for being with us.

  COLLINS: Thank you for having me.

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• Vogue - https://www.vogue.com/article/kathleen-collins-filmmaker-career-daughter-nina-lorez-collins

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  MAGAZINE
  How Kathleen Collins's Daughter Kept Her Late Mother's Career Alive
  SEPTEMBER 5, 2016 4:00 AM
  by NINA LOREZ COLLINS
  nina collins
  Nina Collins in a Karen Walker dress.
  Photographed by Ryan Pfluger, Vogue, September 2016
  A struggling filmmaker whose life was cut short by illness, Kathleen Collins has a soaring career since her daughter reopened her archive.

  Ten years ago, in the middle of an ugly divorce, the most banal of realizations came upon me: In order to find a path out of the mess I’d made, I needed to wrestle with the history that had shaped me. My mother, the late African-American writer, filmmaker, and activist Kathleen Collins, died of breast cancer in 1988 at age 46, when I was still a teenager, leaving me to care for my younger brother. Our parents had split when we were toddlers, and we had been raised by a single, black artist mother, vibrant yet frequently depressed, and unwavering in her commitment to her work. She had kept her illness a secret until two weeks before she died.
  In those first few weeks after we buried her, I filled an old steamer trunk with every scrap of paper I could find among my mother’s things: copies of her many plays, short stories, screenplays, journals, letters; and VHS tapes of her two films, The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and Losing Ground, neither of which had been released theatrically. Along with her work and personal correspondence, there were photographs of her ancestors dating back to 1700s New Jersey farmland, snapshots of her singing with Freedom Riders in Albany, Georgia, in 1962, and a handful of high-quality artistic images of her taken by my father when they were still in love. Over the next two decades, that heavy trunk moved with me everywhere I lived. It was a coffee table in my first studio, spent some time at the foot of my bed in my 20s, and eventually, when I had a house, was relegated to my basement. I often wanted to look inside, and a few times I made tentative forays, but the sight of my mother’s familiar scrawl on the pages made me feel shaky. It was simply, for a very long time, too sad for me to hear her voice again.
  But it had become harder to ignore the likelihood that the depression and anger that were overtaking my life probably had roots in my erratic childhood. Like many women, I felt to some extent as if I was my mother, as if I couldn’t avoid being her. I held on to the conviction that I would die the same way she did; that I would become a single mother; that my unhappiness was the same as hers. The question was whether I could look at our story in a new way.
  As I had told more than one therapist, my earliest memory was one of abandonment. I was two and woke up in the middle of the night calling out for my mother, but to no avail. I started to cry and made my way to the front door of our apartment in the West Village, where I discovered that I was too small to reach the locks. My memory of screaming and crying in the dark and trying to open that locked door remains vivid. Our neighbor heard me and tried to soothe me through the door. Eventually someone found my mother, who had been upstairs in the apartment of a friend. She rushed down, and I imagine must have felt awful. She surely comforted me and put me back to bed, but that part of the experience is gone.
  When I think of her in those early years—tall boots; short skirts; Afro; flashing, heavily made-up eyes—my image is of a sad glamour. I remember her rushing by me a lot, always preoccupied. She and my father were cheating on each other, and both trying to make art, and my guess is I was a bit of an afterthought. There’s a photograph of me in her arms from that period, in which she looks elegant but slightly beleaguered, and I’m peering at her with deep suspicion.

  After my brother, Emilio, was born, she got a job teaching film at City College and moved us to a house along the Hudson River in Piermont, New York, my father being mostly out of the picture. When I think back, the dominant sounds of my childhood are of my mother’s IBM Selectric II clattering away behind her bedroom door; film swishing through the Steenbeck editing machine that sat in our dining room; and, occasionally, Tina Turner blaring from the stereo while she danced like a madwoman in the living room.
  My mother wrote incessantly; multiple creative ventures were always under way, as well as grant applications, project proposals, and constant jottings in her journal. She alternated between being distracted and enraged, often over something my father had done. I was the practical one. From me she would get complaints that we never had Band-Aids, that we didn’t have a fire-escape plan, that I was better at packing our lunches than she was. Of course, what I really wanted was her focus, but that was usually elsewhere. She didn’t know when I was having trouble in school, or later when I was smoking weed or having sex. She was always in her own head.
  For the most part she kept her own love life out of our sight, but as her daughter I was paying close attention, and thus observed her affairs with married men, and young men she worked with on sets. Caught up in the seventies spirit, she went on meditation retreats, did yoga on the second-floor landing, and, during my middle-school years, got interested in New Age phenomena, from biofeedback to macrobiotics. Incense was forever burning.
  I later put together the fact that the New Age trappings coincided with her first diagnosis of cancer, when she was 37, and that she attempted to treat the illness homeopathically. She had two lumpectomies over the next few years (telling us she was at film festivals when she was actually hospitalized), the scars from which she brushed off as “something minor.” She didn’t have radiation or chemotherapy until the last months of her life—after her third recurrence—by which time her body was riddled with disease. She started those treatments soon after I left for Vienna on a study-abroad program, so I never knew. Why she didn’t embrace Western medicine from the start is a mystery, and yes, thinking about it makes me angry.
  One of the last times we spent alone together was a blustery October day in 1987, less than a year before she died. I was a sophomore at Barnard. My mother had fallen in love two years earlier with an academic named Alfred Prettyman, and they had just announced plans to marry. We set out to find her a wedding dress, something suitably bohemian. I hadn’t seen her in a few weeks and noticed she was thinner than usual, and walking funny. She claimed she’d pulled a muscle in her back. That afternoon, we wandered in and out of stores on Columbus Avenue until we found what we both decided was the perfect dress: rose-colored silk with a flared skirt.
  Mom seemed sad that day; we’d been fighting. I was in a feminist snit, with all the righteousness that an eighteen-year-old can bring to it, over the fact that she was planning on taking Alfred’s last name. It felt like an unimaginable betrayal. We argued long and hard about this, and as I look back, I feel terrible that I gave her so much grief. Only in retrospect is it obvious that she knew her cancer had returned, that she was trying to hold together so much.
  A few days after the simple wedding—just family and a justice of the peace in our living room, me sulking, my mother in her pink dress—I flew to Austria. We embarked on eight months of letters in which she filled me in on local gossip, life with Alfred, reflections on her love for us and where she thought she may have failed us—in short, everything under the sun except for the fact that in January, just weeks after she put me on a plane, she began chemotherapy.
  Eighteen years later, on a still midsummer day, I turned to the trunk in earnest. I was upstate, in the home I’d made for myself and my four children in the wake of my divorce. Surrounded by optimistic colors, I lifted the handle in hope of understanding so many things. Reaching inside, I pulled out yellowed reams of paper, some handwritten, others typed. There were short stories I never knew existed, about growing up black bourgeoise in Jersey City; others that fictionalized the intense civil rights work she did with SNCC in her 20s (she worked on voter registration and speechwriting). I found accounts of her difficult relationships with men, from my white father to the playwrights, actors, and writers who followed. I discovered plays and screenplays about the loss of her own mother—my grandmother died when my mother was five months old—and her stern father. After years of being afraid to delve in, I now couldn’t stop reading. The stories were like a portal to her inner life, the themes and characters both strange and familiar, in that way that everything about our parents somehow already exists within us.
  The trunk also held in rubber-banded packets all of her correspondence to me at camp, in Europe, or after we’d argued. I could practically trace the arc of her development as a woman, as an artist, as a mother. In some, she affectionately makes reference to “my Nina’s” personality or accomplishments, and those are passages I read over and over again, never tiring of seeing the proof of her love.
  Most shattering of all was the diary she kept the last year of her life, when she knew she was dying, and I was oblivious. I can line up, side by side, letters she wrote to me bubbling with love and funny anecdotes (one on the back of an envelope while a state trooper was writing her up for speeding), and journal entries from the same days, visualizing her illness as a vile fluid coursing through her bones.
  A side from a single story in a now-defunct literary journal and a play in an eighties anthology, my mother’s writing was never published in her lifetime. She was known as a playwright, and as one of the first black women to make a feature film, but only within the small world of black artists and academics. The films were produced out of our Rockland County house, so I knew them well. When I rewatched them as an adult, it was evident to me that the second one, Losing Ground, a dramatic comedy about a black female philosophy professor and her painter husband, was particularly accomplished, visually striking, and intellectually fresh. I felt a new admiration for her and wondered idly if it would ever see the light of day.
  A couple of years later, the film lab that had been storing my mother’s original 16mm reels contacted me, asking me to pay back storage fees, and it occurred to me that maybe it was time to try and preserve her legacy. These were talky, artsy films, featuring all-black casts in the days well before The Cosby Show and President Obama. No one in the early eighties had wanted to hear these stories, much less distribute them. I didn’t have any illusions that anyone would necessarily want to now, but I felt it was important to save her work. Soon I had had both films restored and found a distributor, Milestone Films. Then, in 2014, Milestone called me to say that Lincoln Center was putting on a film festival about black independent movies in New York, and that Losing Ground had been selected to open it. I was thrilled for my mother, and at the same time grieved anew for her—she would never see her work get shown.
  As the festival date approached, one glowing review after another started to roll in. A color still from the film splashed across the top fold of the New York Times Arts section, under which the critic wrote, “highly cerebral, thick with abstract and erudite dialogue and also full of charm and sensuality. . . . ”
  That fall I received a phone call from the editorial director of the literary journal A Public Space. She was working on an issue about forgotten female artists and wondered if my mother had left any unpublished work. I sent her some early stories. A few months later she published “Interiors,” a barely fictionalized tale of my parents’ unhappy break-up. This December, a full collection, Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, will be released by Ecco Press.
  In the foreword to the book, poet Elizabeth Alexander writes of my mother, “She flinches from nothing.” I love the line because its fierceness reminds me of her, and of me, the way we tackle life head-on. And yet I know my mother did flinch from some things. I think often of a passage from one of the letters she wrote me in Vienna, a few months before she died: “I couldn’t possibly allow myself to love you children except by being a good caretaker and a good provider. I, literally, put my love into that and kept my heart closed. It was all the love I could handle, all I could provide. I was going through my own life keeping up, coping, holding on, trying not to fall apart.” Even as I appreciate the reasons, I can’t help wishing she had been as risk-taking in her maternal love as she was in her work.
  And yet her spirit carries through. I see my mother in each of my children, but perhaps most in my daughter Ruby, who, especially in these times of continuing racial turmoil, has the same interest in activism through the dramatic arts, and thinks she may want to be a film director herself one day. Ruby wrote about Losing Ground’s revival for her college application. Last summer, helping her revise the essay, I was reminded of a day 30 years earlier, lying on my mom’s queen-size bed in Piermont, atop a mauve comforter dotted with white birds, when she helped me craft my own essay about being biracial in an artistic household. Having reached the age my mother was when she died, I have a gentler understanding of all she was trying to do, and forgiveness is within reach.

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• The Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/05/nina-collins-kathleen-collins-bad-decision-mothers-part-interracial-love

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  Book of the day
  Nina Collins: ‘Much of my adult pain came from my mother’s betrayal’
  The former literary agent was 19 when her mother, Kathleen – a pioneering black film-maker and writer – died of cancer. Now, she is releasing a collection of her stories, and her own bittersweet memoir
  Nina Collins
  Nina Collins attends the Film Society Of Lincoln Center’s presentation of Losing Ground. Photograph: Rommel Demano/Getty Images
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  Kate Kellaway
  Sunday 5 February 2017 01.30 EST Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.40 EDT
  When Nina Collins thinks of her mother, Kathleen, she remembers the sound of a typewriter: “an IBM on a rickety old table”, the sight of the yellow notepads on which she wrote in longhand, the view of the Hudson river from her mother’s bedroom window. “She was always writing,” she tells me.

  Yet were it not for Nina, Kathleen Collins, a pioneering African American film director, playwright, civil rights activist and educator, would today be unknown – or no more than an obscure footnote in an academic paper. It was the release of the film Losing Ground, written and directed by Kathleen in 1982, at a film festival at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan in 2015 that brought her triumphantly into focus (the film was never publicly screened in Kathleen’s lifetime). And it was Nina who found the distributor, Milestone Films, and at her own expense ($25,000) had the film remastered – a loving gesture to her mother, but one she assumed would have little impact.

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  The film is a revelation. Confident, untidy – in the way real life is – and haunting, it is a portrait of a black intellectual: a beautiful, aloof professor (Seret Scott) and her artist husband (Bill Gunn), whose charming smile does not blind his wife to his philandering. Celia, the pretty Puerto Rican model (Maritza Rivera) he takes up with, turns the marriage into a tense triangle. The film explores, in a way that recalls DH Lawrence, the struggle of being a woman in love, the tug between art and life, the anger that underscores such conflicts. Richard Brody, in the New Yorker, greeted it as a “nearly lost masterwork”, adding: “Had it been screened widely in its time, it would have marked film history.” When Nina read his review, she wept: “It was very wonderful but strange that my mother could have no idea of this excitement – the film went on to play in art-house cinemas all over the country.”

  'She was there, and loved us, but was not able to be present. She was an artist before a mother'
  Now it is being followed by the publication of Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, a collection of her mother’s stories, chosen by Nina.

  But we begin by talking about Kathleen’s death, aged 46, in 1988. Nina lives in New York: she worked for years as a literary agent but for a long time could not face her mother’s legacy. “When my mother died, I had just turned 19. My parents had divorced when I was little. My brother, Emilio, was 15. My mother married my stepfather a year before she died.”

  Nina was studying German in Vienna when her mother rang her: “You need to come home. I’m fine, but the breast cancer I had before has come back.” She had never told Nina about the cancer: “She had kept this awful secret. It was such a shock.”

  Two weeks later, Kathleen died. Her only instruction to Nina was: “I want you to become Emilio’s legal guardian.” Neither her father nor her stepfather were – Nina chooses her words carefully – “quite engaged” enough for the responsibility. “And so I did it… but it was hard.”

  Why does she think her mother kept the cancer secret? She tells me she has been working on a memoir, off and on, for 10 years to try to answer that question. “I reached a point where I realised much of my adult pain and sadness came from that betrayal,” she says. “It was such a bad decision on her part. She was a believer in alternative medicine – a new age person, she treated herself homeopathically. I think she must have been in denial. When the cancer came back, she was excited I was out in the world and perhaps did not want to affect that. But then again, when I asked my stepfather, years later, he said that she did not want to deal with other people’s grief.”

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  Losing Ground was described by The New Yorker as ‘a nearly lost masterwork’
  Nina’s memoir will be entitled Forgive Me If I Disappear – partly suggested by her mother’s appearance: “She was beautiful, with caramel-coloured skin, delicate hands and feet. She was hippy-dippy… wore leotards, was ethereal.” But the title is also a line from one of her mother’s letters. “It sums up the feeling of my childhood. She was there and loved us, but was not able to be present. She was an artist before a mother.”

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  At 47, Nina is a year older than her mother was when she died, which she finds a “liberation”. She is starting to understand – and forgive: “She was depressed when I was little, yet also vibrant and funny. People imply ours was a bad relationship – I don’t feel that way. But it was a lonely childhood.”

  After her death, Nina put her mother’s papers in a trunk that travelled around with her, but it was not until she had gone through a divorce herself that she decided to open Kathleen’s box (she describes the process in an interview in Vogue). She found a 700-page unfinished novel, two movies, six or seven plays, half a dozen screenplays, letters, a journal and short stories. An admirer of the film, Brigid Hughes, editor of literary journal A Public Space, contacted her in the autumn of 2015. She was producing an issue on forgotten female artists. Did Nina have any unpublished writing by her mother? “Getting never published stories by a dead black woman published would have been impossible without the film,” she says.

  One particularly absorbing story, The Happy Family, subjects domestic harmony to scrutiny. It makes one wonder: was Kathleen’s original family happy? “It was a strict, conservative upbringing, a sad household. Her mother died when Kathleen was a baby – of pneumonia. Her sister, Francine, was epileptic. Her father had a terrible temper – as did she. He remarried a sweet, God-fearing but not super-intellectual woman who lived in her husband’s shadow.”

  In 1963, Kathleen graduated in philosophy and religion from Skidmore, a liberal arts college in New York state, and, in 1966, went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne (her stories are garnished with French words). It was in Paris that she fell in love with Nina’s father. He was white, “super-intellectual”, a Berkeley maths graduate who had done “all sorts of interesting jobs – working on the railroads in Berlin and opera sets in Italy. It was he who turned her on to the surrealists.” And it was he who got Kathleen interested in film (which she studied in Paris). “My father made a short experimental film set on the floor of the New York stock exchange. And together they made – but did not star in – porn films, when I was little, to raise money for their projects.”

  Back in the US, after a stint teaching French, Kathleen got a job as a film editor, and by 1974 was teaching film at City College, New York. Ronald Gray, one of her students, became a cinematographer and suggested they make a narrative film together – the start of Losing Ground.

  What is remarkable in the stories, I say, is the openness with which she writes about sex. Was she like this in life? “She was straightforward and funny. But when I first had sex and told her, she was mortified. She also had a prim side.”

  In what is perhaps the most startling story she writes about confounding expectations by being more refined than the white man she is with – until the end, when she hesitates about climbing into a four-poster bed: “How could I pass beneath the candelabras and undress? Tastefully enough. And make love? Tastefully enough. No coloured woman could…”

  However much reflections on race underline her fiction, it was “not something she talked about at home, or something we felt traumatised by. I never felt complicated about race.” What is amazing, Nina maintains, is her mother’s ability to introduce readers to new characters – to black intellectuals you have never seen before on the screen or on the page.

  I suggest to Nina that the stories – written when Kathleen was in her 20s – are, more than anything, about sorrow. Why was this? “She was an artist, a depressive person, and her relationship with my father was horrible: it features in all the stories and is the basis for Losing Ground.”

  There is a particularly striking story, Interiors, about abandonment and solitude, a portrait of a woman who grows herbs, makes collages and remembers a violin consumed by fire. In another story, she writes: “I was still young enough to be attracted to sorrow.” Nina cherishes her mother’s etching, which reads: “For once in my life, I won’t let sorrow hurt me.” It is, she laughs, a line from a Stevie Wonder song. And Nina chose an arresting, if anguished, line for the book’s opening page: “It is easy to do evil things, easy to harm oneself. To do what is good for oneself is very difficult.” Looking at the second half of that quotation now, it seems to offer itself as a clue to Kathleen and Nina’s story – although Nina is inconclusive, still wrestling with the question: where does she end? Where do I begin?

  • Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins is published by Granta (£12.99). To order a copy for £9.74 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99 Waterstones at Tottenham Court Road, London hosts Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?, a discussion about the stories, and screening of Losing Ground, by Kathleen Collins, on 10 February at 6.30pm

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  Ibsavannah 5 Feb 2017 9:44

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  ‘…the film was never publicly screened in Kathleen’s lifetime…’ is incorrect. Losing Ground was screened on Wednesday 2nd November 1983 at the Bloomsbury Theatre in London at Third Eye, London’s Festival of Third World Cinema.

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  brockleybabe 5 Feb 2017 11:31

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  I would imagine she didn't tell her about the first breast cancer because she didn't want to frighten or burden her. It is a natural protective instinct of most parents. When my father was dying he couldn't tell me as he would have to face his own grief and I think didn't want to be the source of my pain either. These are complex and difficult issues for us all. Can we ever really imagine a life without us in it? Im not sure..

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9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506568198860 1/4
Print Marked Items
Collins, Kathleen: WHATEVER HAPPENED
TO INTERRACIAL LOVE?
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Collins, Kathleen WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE? Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) $15.99
12, 6 ISBN: 978-0-06-248415-4
Published for the first time nearly 30 years after the author's death at age 46, this gorgeous and strikingly intimate short
story collection focuses on the lives and loves of black Americans in the 1960s.In "Exteriors," an unseen narrator
directs the lighting for a disintegrating marriage like a scene from a movie set. "Okay, now backlight the two of them
asleep in the big double bed," says the voice. And then later: "take it way down. She looks too anxious and sad."
"Interiors," the companion story, is a pair of reflective monologues, first the husband ("Sometimes I get the feeling that
when I'm dead happiness is gonna rise up out of your soul and wreck havoc on life"), and then the wife ("the first time
my husband left me, I took a small cabin in the woods, to enjoy a benevolent solitude"). The title story, wrenching and
darkly hilarious, follows a circle of young interracial lovers through 1963, "the year of race-creed-color blindness." In
"The Happy Family," the family's friend recounts the quiet tragedy of their slow unraveling; "When Love Withers All
of Life Cries" documents the emotional landscape of a romance. A pioneering African-American playwright,
filmmaker, and activist best known for her 1982 feature film Losing Ground, Collins has a spectacular sense of
dialogue. These are stories where nothing happens and everything happens, stories that are at once sweeping and very,
very small. Though most of the pieces span only a few pages, they are frequently overwhelmingly rich--not just in their
sharp takes on sex, race, and relationships, but in the power and music of their sentences. Collins' prose is so precise
and hypnotic that no amount of rereading it feels like enough. Astonishing and essential. A gem.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Collins, Kathleen: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329240&it=r&asid=7b5f5fb634bd11c700c2e8487c2eb943.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466329240

---

9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506568198860 2/4
Kathleen Collins: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO
INTERRACIAL LOVE?
Kirkus Reviews.
(Oct. 15, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text: 
Kathleen Collins WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE? Ecco/HarperCollins (Adult Fiction) 9.99
ISBN: 978-0-06-248415-4
Published for the first time nearly 30 years after the author's death at age 46, this gorgeous and strikingly intimate short
story collection focuses on the lives and loves of black Americans in the 1960s.In “Exteriors,” an
unseen narrator directs the lighting for a disintegrating marriage like a scene from a movie set. “Okay, now
backlight the two of them asleep in the big double bed,” says the voice. And then later: “take it way
down. She looks too anxious and sad.” “Interiors,” the companion story, is a pair of
reflective monologues, first the husband (“Sometimes I get the feeling that when I’m dead happiness
is gonna rise up out of your soul and wreck havoc on life”), and then the wife (“the first time my
husband left me, I took a small cabin in the woods, to enjoy a benevolent solitude”). The title story,
wrenching and darkly hilarious, follows a circle of young interracial lovers through 1963, “the year of racecreed-color
blindness.” In “The Happy Family,” the family’s friend recounts the
quiet tragedy of their slow unraveling; “When Love Withers All of Life Cries” documents the
emotional landscape of a romance. A pioneering African-American playwright, filmmaker, and activist best known for
her 1982 feature film Losing Ground, Collins has a spectacular sense of dialogue. These are stories where nothing
happens and everything happens, stories that are at once sweeping and very, very small. Though most of the pieces
span only a few pages, they are frequently overwhelmingly rich—not just in their sharp takes on sex, race, and
relationships, but in the power and music of their sentences. Collins’ prose is so precise and hypnotic that no
amount of rereading it feels like enough. Astonishing and essential. A gem.
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Kathleen Collins: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General
OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551490&it=r&asid=567005853c0a9c61fccb4d136da0ab62.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551490

---

9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506568198860 3/4
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Publishers Weekly.
263.38 (Sept. 19, 2016): p42.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
* Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Kathleen Collins. Ecco, $15.99 trade paper (192p) ISBN 978-0-06-248415-4
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Race, gender, love, and sexuality are portrayed beautifully and humanely in this previously unpublished collection of
stories from groundbreaking African-American filmmaker and civil rights activist Collins, who died in 1988 at the age
of 46. Drawing on Collins's career as a filmmaker and playwright, the stories incorporate stage directions, dramatic
monologues, and camera-eye perspectives that frame the racial tension of the 1960s with both frankness and
tenderness. "Exteriors" details a failing relationship from the outside, set up as a film scene through a lighting
designer's eye, while "Interiors" gives us the inner monologues from the perspectives of the couple in a failed marriage.
The title story follows a group of interracial couples as each member explores his/her own identity while trying to fit in
with the identity of the other. In the gripping "Only Once," a woman recalls her thrill-seeking lover and his final act of
recklessness. "The Happy Family" seems happy on the surface, but a closer look by the family's friend reveals the
cracks that broke the family apart. Full of candor, humor, and poise, this collection, so long undiscovered, will finally
find the readers it deserves. (Dec.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 42. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352690&it=r&asid=9a914f316b68fcb4aa00732fb9a7ac16.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A464352690

---

9/27/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1506568198860 4/4
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?
Valerie Hawkins
Booklist.
113.5 (Nov. 1, 2016): p29.
COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text: 
Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? By Kathleen Collins. Dec. 2016. 192p. Ecco, paper, $15.99
(9780062484154).
Collins, a pioneering black female filmmaker whose Losing Ground (1982) had its first DVD release just this year,
passed away in 1988, leaving behind this collection of tales that are complete without feeling completed. The stories
are set in different eras. The earlier ones take place during the 1960s civil rights movement, and the later ones bring
readers to South Africa divestment protests of the 1980s. As the provocative collection title suggests, interracial love is
the chief romantic theme Collins explores in stories of varying lengths and complexity, but it's not her only focus. She
also examines the different types of connections formed within African American family relationships across
generations. And a few stories are wholly stream-of-consciousness. Each of Collins' stories leaves the reader wanting
to know more about the characters and their creator, which makes this an intriguing and bittersweet publication of these
stories long awaiting the attention they deserve. --Valerie Hawkins
Hawkins, Valerie
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
Hawkins, Valerie. "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" Booklist, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 29. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471142808&it=r&asid=9f24f047a19a5d6944949d240d244c9b.
Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A471142808

"Collins, Kathleen: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329240&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. "Kathleen Collins: WHATEVER HAPPENED TO INTERRACIAL LOVE?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551490&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" Publishers Weekly, 19 Sept. 2016, p. 42. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA464352690&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017. Hawkins, Valerie. "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" Booklist, 1 Nov. 2016, p. 29. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA471142808&it=r. Accessed 27 Sept. 2017.

• The New Yorker
  https://www.newyorker.com/culture/richard-brody/whatever-happened-to-interracial-love-kathleen-collinss-revelatory-short-stories
  Word count: 2425

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  Richard Brody
  “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?”: Kathleen Collins’s Revelatory Short Stories

  By Richard Brody
  December 1, 2016

  Kathleen Collins endows the short stories in “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” with a cinematic sense of form.Photograph by Mark Reid
  There ’s a special category of superb filmmakers who started as writers, such as the novelists Éric Rohmer, Ousmane Sembène, and Marguerite Duras, as well as the playwrights Sacha Guitry and Kenneth Lonergan. These filmmakers are distinguished not only by their attention to the language that’s spoken in their films but by the very sense of discourse that gives rise to a particular and personal sense of cinematic form. Now there’s another name to add to the list—the late Kathleen Collins, who died in 1988, at the age of forty-six, and who has unfortunately been inscribed only belatedly in the modern pantheon of directors.
  Collins’s first and only feature, “Losing Ground,” from 1982, had just a handful of screenings in her lifetime. The film was the great rediscovery of 2015, when it received its first official release at Film Society of Lincoln Center. It’s the story of a professor of philosophy (Seret Scott) who’s seeking to move her studies toward a realm of aesthetic experience that engages with African-American culture, as her theoretical work branches out, through the course of circumstances, into movies. Her husband (Bill Gunn), an artist, seeks new inspirations, and finds his creative freedom to be inseparable from sexual adventure, threatening their marriage.
  Prior to the production of “Losing Ground,” Collins had worked as a film editor and was both a teacher of French and a professor of film. But now a previously unpublished collection of stories that she wrote between 1970 and 1980, “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” is being issued by Ecco, and it’s a multidimensional revelation whose invisibility until now is as grievous a loss to literature as the near-disappearance of “Losing Ground” has been to the world of movies.
  Collins endows her stories with a sense of form that is itself cinematic; they suggest the aesthetic roots of “Losing Ground,” and convey a painfully vivid idea of the movies that Collins might have made, had the film achieved the recognition that it deserved and had she lived to do so. Several of the volume’s stories are set in the world of independent filmmaking, offering a glimpse into the personal and professional struggles that she endured as one of the very few black women making movies at that time. Collins, a civil-rights activist in the early nineteen-sixties, delves deep into modern history and personal experience to yield, in calm yet prismatic phrases, urgent and deeply affecting insights into her times, which echo disturbingly today, in light of their long-delayed publication.
  The book’s first two stories, with their expressly cinematic titles, “Exteriors” and “Interiors,” suggest sketches of movies, ones that elegantly foreshadow the world of “Losing Ground.” “Exteriors” is entirely in quotation marks; it reads like a director giving instructions to a crew for decorating and lighting an on-location set. The effect intensifies as Collins’s directions grow ever more explicit regarding the troubled romance of the couple whose lives she’s filming: “Now dim the light . . . On second thought, kill it, he won’t come in before morning.” “Interiors” is a duet for two characters, “Husband” and “Wife, whose internal monologues, addressing each other, are centered on his affair with another woman, an apocalyptic party that recordings of Cuban music turn into “a disembodied orgy,” and the efforts by the wife, a violinist, to put her life back together outside the city after the couple’s breakup. In the story “Documentary Style,” Collins works a powerful dramatic reversal on her years as a film editor, telling a first-person story from the perspective of an experienced and life-hardened black cameraman who’s trying to fight his way into the business in New York. Proud of his talent and his craft, energized with artistic ambition, he’s casually demeaned at work by a successful black director and by a veteran white cameraman—and Collins generates a vast well of sympathy for him, even as she sees him indulging in self-justification, and subtly shows his virtues morphing into arrogance, self-righteousness, and rage, which he takes out on a black woman film editor in a shocking display of macho brutality.

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  In other stories, Collins reaches back into her intimate past for dramas of a young black woman’s sexual experience. Here as throughout the book, personal experience is inseparable from that of racial consciousness and its varied gradations. “How Does One Say,” the tale of the unnamed woman’s sexual awakening with an elderly but vigorous French professor, begins with a family drama over her new haircut, which “made her look, in her father’s words, ‘just like any other colored girl.’ ” The quietly defiant story “Stepping Back” begins with the assertion “I’m not trying to flatter myself, but I was the first colored woman he ever seriously considered loving.” With bitter irony, Collins unfolds the narrator’s “uncolored” essence, which makes her an even more enticing choice for the “Negro with aristocratic tendencies” who flatters her with his affection—until she rebels. (The story also features the phrase “Ain’t this a blip!,” which Collins used in a similar way in “Losing Ground,” to assert the force of black-American experience against the ostensible neutrality of white-toned academic culture.)
  In “Conference: Parts I and II,” Collins uses an ingenious format to bring back romance from the time of civil-rights struggles, starting with an incantatory series of dialogue fragments with an activist named Charlie Jones:
  “Charlie Jones?”
  “Yes, ma’am?”
  “You’re a freedom rider?”
  “Yes, ma’am . . .”
  “They beat you up in Selma?”
  “Yes, ma’am. . .”
  “They beat you up? With your light skin and your green eyes? How could they do that? Weren’t you afraid?”
  The title story is a fictionalized reminiscence, set in 1963, in “an apartment on the Upper West Side shared by two interracial roommates. It’s the year of ‘the human being.’ The year of race-creed-color blindness.” The protagonist, Cheryl, a recent college graduate who was “the only one”—the only black student at the school—and her friends are all given the labels “ ‘white ’ ” or “ ‘negro’ ” by Collins, in explicitly ironic quotation marks. The romances of the title are set expressly in the context of the experience of history, sociology, and politics by way of the civil-rights movement. Cheryl’s “white” boyfriend, Alan, “has just had his jaw dislocated in a Mississippi jail.” Collins brings out surprising fractures in the black community—notably, the shock that the civil-rights movement brought to the “black bourgeoisie” (a term that she parenthesizes with sarcastic academic references), who “will see their children abandon a lifetime of de-ghettoizing. Their sons will go to jail for freedom (which in their parents’ minds is no different from going to jail for armed robbery, heroin addiction, pimping, and other assorted ethnic hustles).”
  In this story, Collins’s very use of parentheses is an art. She brings action and reflection, foreground and context, personal relations and analytical judgment together in a story that emphasizes the private impact of political thought and activism. She shows how the principles of the fight for desegregation influenced relationships in one direction, and how, just a year or two later, the very phrase “Black Power” influenced them in another. She fills the story with references to reading matter (including “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” “Toward a Psychology of Being,” “Rabbit, Run,” and “The Centaur”), talks about voter registration and the the Democratic Party Convention of 1964, and describes the opposition of Cheryl’s own father, a black man with “gray bourgeois eyes,” who saw her relationship with Alan as “indecent commingling.” Collins also reëmphasizes that the campaign for civil rights was nonviolent only from one side, the side of the protesters; the opponents of civil rights were relentlessly violent, and the violence that the protesters endured separated them definitively from those who stayed home: “How can he bring his father to an understanding of what it feels like to be beaten to a pulp? Teeth mashed in, jaw dislocated, nose rearranged, stomach pulpy. And all for freedom. All for the ‘negroes’ of this land we call America.”
  Style is the image of a physical approach to the world; form is the image of thinking about what you’re doing. Collins’s style is fine, graceful, and reserved, but pierced with the harsh simplicity of lurking menace. It’s not a style that grabs at life but that moves into it, that passes through it with a quietly adamant determination to keep going but without any illusions about taking action, which she knows is as much a matter of being acted upon. It’s a mode of action that’s inseparable from thought, from analysis, which the imaginative formal conceits of her stories give physical shape to. It’s also inseparable from the power of memory, as in the last and longest story in the book, “Dead Memories . . . Dead Dreams,” a quasi-Proustian gathering of family stories, told by a young woman named Lillian, the darkest child of a family of light-complexioned black people. She centers her recollections on the house of her grandmother Rosie, whose notable activity was her cooking, and the story is filled with descriptions of the dishes and the aromas with which they filled the house. It’s also a story of long-tangled relations between her father and the family of her late mother, who died in childbirth, and it moves through questions of money and vanity, of social status and prescribed possibilities, of breaking out and of settling in. Its twenty-seven pages embrace a vast array of African-American experiences and moods, of voices and of imaginings. The self-aware literary techniques with which Collins recovers her own experience—and the life of her times—conjure her sense of an increasing fraction of distance from them; she conveys the same ironic melancholy in the very title of her first feature, “Losing Ground.”

  Richard Brody began writing for The New Yorker in 1999, and has contributed articles about the directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Samuel Fuller. He writes about movies in his blog for newyorker.com. He is the author of “Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard.”Read more »
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  BOOKS

  Kathleen Collins’s ‘Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?’
  Books of The Times
  By DWIGHT GARNER NOV. 29, 2016
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  Credit Patricia Wall/The New York Times
  When the filmmaker, playwright and fiction writer Kathleen Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, at 46, she left behind a wide body of work that’s only beginning to see the light of day.

  She was among the first black women to direct a feature-length film. That movie, “Losing Ground” (1982), parsed black intellectual life in New York City; it was about a female philosophy professor and her wayward husband, a painter. It never had a theatrical release. Just last year its premiere was held at Lincoln Center, where it played to sold-out crowds.

  She was a feverish artist, working on many fronts. In an essay in the September issue of Vogue, her daughter, Nina Lorez Collins, recalls, “When I think back, the dominant sounds of my childhood are of my mother’s IBM Selectric II clattering away behind her bedroom door; film swishing through the Steenbeck editing machine that sat in our dining room; and, occasionally, Tina Turner blaring from the stereo while she danced like a madwoman in the living room.”

  Ms. Collins grew up in Jersey City, where her father was a funeral director who became a state legislator. She graduated from Skidmore College and received a master’s degree in French literature from Paris-Sorbonne University. She worked to register black voters in Georgia with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s and was twice arrested. She was a film history professor at City College. Her plays include “In the Midnight Hour” (1980) and “The Brothers” (1982).

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  If Ms. Collins’s films went largely unseen, her fiction went unread. With the exception of a short story that appeared in a journal, now defunct, she was all-but unpublished during her lifetime. Many of the stories that fill “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?,” the first collection of her work, were pulled by her daughter from a trunk.

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  The best of these stories are a revelation. Ms. Collins had a gift for illuminating what the critic Albert Murray called the “black intramural class struggle,” and two or three of her stories are so sensitive and sharp and political and sexy I suspect they will be widely anthologized.

  If the bulk of the 16 stories in “Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?” are less fully realized, they point in directions she might have taken had she lived. They have a talky, crackling quality that keeps them afloat even when they veer toward the pretentious.

  I felt compelled to provide the biographical material at the start of this review because this collection’s foreword, by the poet Elizabeth Alexander, is nearly fact free and perfectly unhelpful.

  This foreword is titled “In Search of Kathleen Collins,” yet Ms. Alexander writes almost entirely about herself. On the back flap, Ms. Alexander’s paragraph of biographical details is longer than the author’s. Ms. Collins deserves a proper introduction to American readers, one she does not receive here.

  This collection’s title story gives us Ms. Collins in full flower. It is about two roommates in an Upper West Side apartment. It’s 1963 or, as Ms. Collins declares, “the year of racial, religious, and ethnic mildew.”

  One roommate is a white community organizer in Harlem, fresh out of Sarah Lawrence and dating a black poet. The other is a young black woman who was jailed during civil rights protests in Georgia; she’s in love with a white Freedom Rider.

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  When the young black woman went South, she shed some of her proper bourgeois upbringing and began to feel the shaggy earth beneath her feet. Her father is apoplectic. What’s happened to his perfect strait-laced daughter?

  “She had even committed the final sin, the unforgivable sin of (‘negro’) girlhood: she had cut off her hair,” Ms. Collins writes. “‘How few negro girls are blessed with long hair?’ her father had sobbed. ‘How could you go and turn yourself into a negro just like any other negro?’”

  This story continues: “At any moment a toothless grin would spread across her face and she would be a walking replica of all his nightmares — she would shuffle backward and grin and her bushy hair would stand on end and she would have turned into ‘a colored woman.’”

  The conversation in Ms. Collins’s stories is good, and often it’s about culture and ideas. Her men and women have well-stocked minds. The young black woman in the title story is reading four books at once, including two John Updike novels. She can’t help but repeat in mockery, in a kind of refrain, hapless lines from Updike’s “The Centaur,” which appeared in 1963: “Listen to me, lady. I love you, I want to be a Negro for you.”

  These cultural references, which sometimes weigh these stories down, can be admirably catholic. In the story “Lifelines,” a woman’s husband is jailed in Santo Domingo for fraud. She sends him literary care packages that include books by Kierkegaard and Proust, as well as current issues of The New York Review of Books, Le Nouvel Observateur and (because pictures are worth a thousand words) Playboy, Players and Oui.

  Another important story in this collection is “The Happy Family.” Told by a young white man, it’s about the black family he meets and falls in love with at a church rally for civil rights in the early 1960s.

  The man’s own childhood had been a wreck. This new family is warm and deeply intellectual. (The father is a history professor at Columbia.) Their home is “a happy place where joy and justice meet.”

  An unexpected romance blossoms. The narrator observes the beauty of these promising young people but can’t help but intone, “Oh my God, you thought, how life will take them apart.”

  Ms. Collins writes in the title story,“We are swimming along in the mythical underbelly of America.” She continues, as if speaking for the entirety of this book, “there where it is soft and prickly, where you may rub your nose against the grainy sands of illusion and come up bleeding.”

  Follow Dwight Garner on Twitter: @DwightGarner

  Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

  Stories

  By Kathleen Collins, with a foreword by Elizabeth Alexander

  175 pages. Ecco. $15.99.

  A version of this review appears in print on November 30, 2016, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Forceful Voice, Unheard for So Long. Today's Paper|Subscribe

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• The Guardian
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/feb/24/whatever-happened-to-interracial-love-by-kathleen-collins-review
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  Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? by Kathleen Collins review – black power and pathos
  Written during the 1960s and 70s, these posthumously published stories from the civil rights activist and film-maker seem startlingly prescient
  Radical fervour … Kathleen Collins.
  Radical fervour … Kathleen Collins. Photograph: Douglas Collins
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  Colin Grant
  Friday 24 February 2017 07.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 20 September 2017 05.39 EDT
  When in 1975 Alice Walker, working as an editor on Ms. Magazine in New York, received a batch of stories from an unknown writer, there must have been a moment of recognition: like Walker, fledgling author Kathleen Collins was black, tertiary educated, a former civil rights activist and had married a white man.

  Walker’s tardy response – “We kept these so long because we liked them so much … I wanted to buy them as a set” – could not disguise the polite rejection that followed. For three decades the stories kept the company of woodlice in a trunk where Collins’s forgotten manuscripts lay yellowing and undisturbed. Now, through happenstance and the determination of her daughter, readers may be as surprised as I was by the rich range of the seasoned literary voice – modern, confident, emotionally intelligent and humorous – that emerges from the pages of the posthumously published Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?

  Nina Collins: ‘Much of my adult pain came from my mother’s betrayal’
  Read more
  The title of this collection poses a pertinent question: actually, whatever did become of the heady promise of interracial love amid the racial conflagrations of 1960s USA? The reality never lived up to the Hollywood fantasy of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, in which Sidney Poitier’s “negro” doctor – with perfect manners, starched collar and ultra-clean fingernails – falls in love with a young white liberal woman.

  The suggestion that love might soften if not conquer differences between the races is echoed in the radical fervour of Collins’s characters. They include dilettantes (“everyone who is anyone will find at least one ‘negro’ to bring home to dinner”) and the committed – black and white people putting their bodies on the line, idealists who march, ride the freedom buses, and sometimes, in deliciously illicit affairs, lie down together.

  Many of the stories are inversions of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with young black female protagonists. These sexual and racial adventurers contravene social mores and upset their class-conscious relatives, whose aspirations for family members’ courtships and unions with the lighter-skinned do not extend to dangerous liaisons with white folk. Collins adopts an unflinching prose style, as bold as the character with “a cold longing weighted” between her legs who yearns for “a little light fucking” with a man who is not cursed “with a penis about the size of a pea”. But she also deftly complicates the perceived limits of free love in her description of a heroine tormented by memories of her partner unbuttoning himself in front of other women.

  The stories were written in the late 1960s and 70s, when black power exploded, and have a persistently delightful quality of spring awakening, with sassy flower-bedecked students in bell-bottomed trousers and rollneck sweaters. Their free spirits are contrasted with their anxious, middle-class fathers, for whom the revolution has come too soon, and who fret that by cutting off their carefully groomed hair, their expensively educated daughters are also severing opportunities for advancement – that they will become “just like any other coloured girl”.

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  The pathos in these often thinly veiled biographical tales is reserved for this older generation. An energetic widowed undertaker, who “won’t sit still long enough to die”, shares the upbringing of his only child with a disapproving mother-in-law. An uncle is forever “broke but still so handsome and beautiful, lazy and generous”, his light skin a noble lie of possibilities that are never realised; his life, a long lament, closes as he “cried himself to death”.

  Collins taught film at the City College of New York, and some stories, cutting between scenes and characters, are rendered almost as film scripts, with the reader in place of the camera panning back and forth, adding subtle layers of inference and meaning. The stories speak to each other, eliding time, allowing characters who are versions of each other to reveal and deepen aspects hinted at previously.

  In defying convention with their interracial love, Collins’s headstrong black protagonists are far more vulnerable when love fails: they can’t go on, and yet there’s no going back. Exposed and humiliated, they find solace in the anonymity of the uncaring metropolis. “I relieved the outer edges of my sadness,” says a forsaken lover in one of the most poignant stories, “Interiors”, “letting it blend with the surf-like monotony of the cars splashing below the faint, luminescent splendour of the New York skyline.”

  Paul Valéry wrote that a work of art is never completed but abandoned. Collins’s health betrayed her art; she died from breast cancer aged 46 in 1988. But 30 years on, her abandoned stories seem fresh and distinctive and, in a new age of anxiety and crisis of identity, startlingly prescient.

  • Colin Grant’s Bageye at the Wheel is published by Vintage. Whatever Happened to Interracial Love? is published by Granta. To order a copy for £9.74 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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  Kathleen Collins (II) (1942–1988)
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  Trivia: She was the first Black American woman to make and release a feature film.
  Born: March 18, 1942 in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA
  Died: September 18, 1988 (age 46)
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• Los Angeles Times
  http://beta.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-collins-interraciallove-20161128-story.html
  Word count: 1065

  An almost-lost gem: 'Whatever Happened to Interracial Love'
  By Justin Taylor
  Dec 02, 2016 | 07:00 AM
  "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" by Kathleen Colli
  "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" by Kathleen Colli (Ecco)

  Kathleen Collins was a professor of film history at New York’s City College who made a groundbreaking contribution to the subject that she taught. “Losing Ground” (1982), which Collins wrote and directed, was one of the first feature-length dramas made by an African American woman. Collins, who was also an activist and playwright, never got the chance to make another film. She died in 1988, at age 46, after a bout with breast cancer — a life, and a life’s work, cut brutally short.

  "Losing Ground" is the story of a marriage in crisis and an intimate portrait of the black creative class in New York in the 1970s. Sarah, a promising young academic, is married to Victor, an older and somewhat louche painter who has just made his first major sale to a museum. (Notably, his work is acquired not by an American institution but by the Louvre.) To celebrate, they rent a summer house in a majority-Puerto Rican community in the Hudson Valley, where Victor becomes smitten with the local culture (and a local woman) while Sarah starves for intellectual and emotional attention, until one of her students asks her to come back to the city to star in a film of his.

  Richard Brody, writing in the New Yorker this past spring, called "Losing Ground" "a nearly lost masterwork" and noted ruefully that "[h]ad it screened widely in its time, it would have marked film history." The film, which never had a theatrical release, was digitally remastered in 2015 and released on DVD and Blu-ray. The project was overseen by Collins' daughter Nina, who began exploring her mother's archives in 2006. That same exploration has now yielded up a manuscript's worth of short fiction, newly published as "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?"

  The title story is set in 1963, "[t]he year of race-creed-color blindness," when "Idealism came back in style. People got along for a while." The main characters are two recent Sarah Lawrence graduates — both women; one black and one white — who have turned their Upper West Side apartment into an "interracial mecca" for artists, poets and activists. Wry notice is taken of "another nubile Sarah Lawrence girl ('white')" who accompanies a "young, vital heroin addict ('Negro')."
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  Every character is tagged by race, but the tag is always in scare quotes, an acknowledgment of the simultaneous absurdity and inescapability of race as a category. The black roommate takes her lover, a white Freedom Rider, to meet her father, who is in the hospital after a stroke. "He could not move a muscle, yet he seemed to be saying, Is it for this that I fought and struggled all these years, for this, this indecent commingling?" The Freedom Rider, meanwhile, has a father who "will not even venture to meet the girl he has chosen to marry." How can he ever bring such a man "to an understanding of what it feels like to be beaten to a pulp? Teeth mashed in, jaw dislocated, nose rearranged, stomach pulpy. And all for freedom."

  Several pieces draw on Collins' knowledge of the film world. "Exteriors" describes a couple's argument in terms of the set decoration and lighting in their apartment. "When Love Withers All of Life Cries" plays with the film script as a literary form, and "Documentary Style" is a satire narrated by an egotistical assistant cameraman who thinks he ought to be in charge of the shoot he's working on. "Broken Spirit," "Treatment for a Story" and "Only Once," meanwhile, pack worlds of emotion into a few pages apiece. (Comparisons to Amy Hempel and Grace Paley have been made, and are apropos.)

  Collins can work wonders with a single line. The narrator of "The Uncle" recalls the ne'er-do-well she grew up worshipping: "To be broke but still so handsome and beautiful, lazy and generous." Christine, in "The Happy Family," "wanted so much for her father to laugh, be gay; it was as if she were seeing her childhood for the first time with all its gloomy contours and she wanted so much for it to be otherwise." A woman in "When Love Withers All of Life Cries" remarks, "I hate fights … fights and working both make me sick."
  Kathleen Collins, author of "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?"
  Kathleen Collins, author of "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?" (Ronald Gray )

  There is admittedly — perhaps inevitably — some variation in quality among the 16 stories. I will even share my suspicion that the author herself, had she lived, might have regarded a few of them as not quite finished. But Collins' voice is so original, her corpus so small and this discovery of her work so long overdue that one can only applaud the editors' decision to err on the side of inclusion. At this point, why hold anything back?

  In the foreword to the volume, poet Elizabeth Alexander writes, "The very existence of this book feels to me like an assurance that while we may think we have done our archival work and unearthed all the treasures of black thinking women, there is always something more to find. We have literary foremothers who are not just the ones we know we had, who continue to remind us of ourselves: Our minds are intricate. Our desires are complex. We are gorgeously contradictory in our epistemologies. We were not invented yesterday."

  That this needs to be said at all, much less spelled out and insisted upon, should occasion reflection and dismay, particularly among those — such as yours truly — whose historical privilege has all too often facilitated passive ignorance and/or active tuning out of what are (or ought to be) self-evident truths. But please understand that I'm not asking you to eat your literary spinach here. The best reason to read this book is simply that it is fantastic: original, provocative, revelatory and bursting with life.

  Taylor's most recent book is the short story collection "Flings."

  ::

  "Whatever Happened to Interracial Love?"

  Kathleen Collins

  Ecco: 192 pp., $15.99 paper

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