Despite how deeply I connected with Toad, I was unprepared for the isolation of editing the work of a deceased writer. Up to that point, for me, editing had always been a conversation, a pleasing tension between two people. When I prepared to make even the smallest edits to Toad, I found I could not; the writer wasn’t there. I held both ends of the rope, and the responsibility was stymying.

A deft procrastinator, I decided to read Geek Love yet again, in hopes that it might divine the way forward. In fact, the table of contents offered some advice. Geek Love’s chapters have brassy titles like “Popcorn Pimp” and “Blood, Stumps, and Other Changes.” Toad initially lacked uniform section breaks as well as demarcated chapters and parts, so I imposed chapter titles composed from the text. It felt like a small thing, but afterward the novel possessed a discernible architecture upon which I made subsequent changes.

In Toad, there are two Sallys: one is a young woman who is plagued by self-hatred, maintains a string of relationships with unfaithful men, and is disappointed in her own unrealized dreams. The other Sally, having survived all this, relishes the life she’s made: lonely and modest, but sweeter because all of it is her design. In the original draft, the alternating perspectives were sequenced haphazardly; I rearranged some for the sake of pacing, and others so that the Sallys more clearly mirror each other across time.

The months I spent reading Dunn’s unpublished fiction are marked by a frustrated incredulity. Surely someone has been here before, I thought, again and again. Wouldn’t someone else already have come looking for this? One afternoon, I printed it all out, everything that I had read in full: the manuscript for Toad, the transcribed stories, extant poems, and correspondence from the archive. I wanted to see it all together, feel the weight of it. All this work, all these words, all the hours, all this time, I thought, turning the pages, turning the pages. This writing, these words, this woman.

After Toad was announced, one journalist described it as a “lost” book, a term often applied to texts unearthed from archives or reissued after many years of being out of print. But it never seemed accurate. It overlooks the detailed work the archivists at the Watzek Library devoted to Dunn’s papers to guarantee they weren’t lost. And it suggests that one only had to read this book to see its value. I’ve come to consider “lost” a sinister fiction that elides the cascading failures of an industry that for centuries has heralded the work of white cis men and erected a canon that celebrates only a sliver of the spectrum of human experience. The consequences of this narrowmindedness, this pitiful vision, are vast. It normalizes and maintains the belief that great literature is the province of certain men and infers that the women and other outsiders who rival them are unusual and rare. Their books aren’t lost; they’re forgotten, neglected, subjugated by a system that disincentivizes their existence. I’m glad Toad is no longer relegated to that fate. I hope it helps usher in a greater understanding of what we can learn from overlooked literary histories.