In Memoriam: Kathryn H. Kidd

Kathryn Helms Kidd passed away on December 14, 2015. She was 65. Kathy was an accomplished author, writing four novels (including Paradise Vue and Lovelock), one children’s book, and ten non-fiction books, as well as innumerable magazine and web articles. She was the associate editor (or managing editor) of Meridian Magazine until 2008, and wrote articles and moderated discussions for that web publication from at least 2004 to 2013. From 2012 she has written for Nauvoo Times, an Orson Scott Card-related web magazine. Her blog Planet Kathy includes a blog and links to many of her works.

Here is a sketch of her early life, taken from her Nauvoo Times page. “A native of New Orleans, Kathy grew up in Mandeville, Louisiana. She attended Brigham Young University as a generic Protestant, having left the Episcopal Church when she was eight because that church didn’t believe what she did. She joined The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints as a BYU junior, finally overcoming her natural stubbornness because she wanted a patriarchal blessing and couldn’t get one unless she was a member of the Church. She was baptized on a Saturday and received her patriarchal blessing two days later.”

After graduating from BYU, Kidd’s first job was a reporter at the Deseret News. Around that time she married Clark L. Kidd. The two moved to Northern Virginia in 1987, where they have served as temple workers in the Washington D. C. since 1995.

Kidd’s friendship with Orson Scott Card has clearly been a key part of her literary career. Card has said Kidd “had been my friend since back in the days when she was a reporter for the Desert News and I was an assistant editor at The Ensign in Salt Lake City. I had been a witness at her wedding to Clark Kidd. And I had goaded her into writing a Mormon novel to help me launch my small publishing company.” They both wrote for Compute Books in the early 1980s. In 1989 Card created his own publishing house for Mormon literature, Hatrack River Publications. It published nine novels from 1989 to 1997, all by female authors, mostly about contemporary Mormon women. Kidd’s novel Paradise Vue was the company’s first book. She also wrote the children’s novel The Innkeeper’s Daughter (1990), about the birth of Christ, and the novels The Alphabet Season (1991) and Return to Paradise (1997). Richard Cracroft in BYU Today (March 1991) called Paradise Vue “the funniest Mormon novel since Sam Taylor’s Heaven Knows Why.”

I enjoyed her Paradise novels quite a bit. She created a ward full of funny, somewhat crazy members as supporting characters to her more normal (if somewhat condescending) protagonists. They also had a serious, even dark, sides to them, with husbands leaving their families, members doing very cruel things, and obsessive behavior. She also wrote the funniest Mormon short story I have ever read, “Voucher and the Christmas Wars”, in Aspen Press’s Christmas Around the World collection (1991). There is something about Church pageants that go awry that makes for great comedy. She also wrote “The Norman Rockwell Christmas Feast” for Once Upon a Christmastime: Short Stories for the Season, Deseret Book, 1997.

At the February 1997 AML Conference, Kidd spoke on a panel on Mormon Humor. In the talk, entitled “You Stole My Life and I Hate You.”, she said her novels ruined some friendships in her former Salt Lake City ward, besides winning her some new enemies. She warned the audience, “If what you write is too close to home, people will think you’re writing about them. We Mormons don’t like reminders that we haven’t been translated yet. The polite fiction among church members is that we don’t notice one another’s faults.”

Kidd’s one major national work was co-authoring the science fiction novel Lovelock (TOR, 1994) with Card. It is told through the eyes of a mentally enhanced capuchin monkey, who accompanies a family on a huge starship which carried a whole community on a long-term space voyage. In the introduction, Card wrote, “She had strengths that I couldn’t match, among them her natural humor; her ability to create a whole community of quirky, fascinating people: her deft handling of pain.” Lovelock has been translated into Spanish and Polish. It was supposed to be the first of a trilogy, The Mayflower Trilogy, and Card and Kidd have even recently talked about completing the next volume, Rasputin, but so far it has not appeared. The Kidds are often mentioned in the acknowledgments of Card’s books.

In 1998 Kidd shifted back to writing non-fiction. With her husband Clark she co-wrote A Convert’s Guide to Mormon Life (Bookcraft), which won a 1998 AML Award for Devotional Literature. The pair went on to co-write six Mormon advice books for Bookcraft or Deseret Book.

In recent years Kidd has suffered from a variety of serious health conditions, including COPD (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease), congestive heart failure and pulmonary hypertension. In December 2012 she experienced a 12-day medical-induced coma, and was hospitalized until March 2013. She came out of the coma improved in some ways, but suffered paralyzation of her legs and feet, and never fully regained her health.

Here is Kathryn’s book bibliography, from her website.

 

Title	Type	Description	Publisher	Year (Note)	Link to Buy
Free Agency	LDS Board Game	Similar to the game of “Life,” but with LDS themes	The Game Factory	1980 (1)
VIC Games for Kids	Computer	Educational games for the VIC-20 computer	Compute Books	1983 (1)
Commodore 64 Games for Kids	Computer	Educational games for the Commodore 64 computer	Compute Books	1984 (1)
Compute’s IBM PC Games for Kids	Computer	Educational games for the IBM PC and PCJr  computers	Compute Books	1984 (1)
Apple II Games for Kids	Computer	Educational games for the Apple II computer	Compute Books	1985 (1)
Recipes and Legends of the West Mountain Inn	Travel	A guide to the West Mountain Inn in Arlington, Vermont	Self-published	1986 (1)
Paradise Vue	LDS Fiction / Adult	A humorous look at a (not so) typical LDS ward	Hatrack River Publications	1989	Hatrack River
The Innkeeper’s Daughter	LDS Fiction / Children	The birth of Christ from a young girl’s viewpoint	Hatrack River Publications	1990	Hatrack River
The Alphabet Year	LDS Fiction / Adult	The adventures of a woman and her day care experiement	Hatrack River Publications	1991	Hatrack River
Lovelock Mayflower Trilogy Volume 1	Science Fiction	The adventures of a hardy group of space pioneers	TOR Books	1994 (2)	Amazon Books
Return to Paradise	LDS Fiction / Adult	More of the crazy antics of folks in the Paradise Vue ward	Hatrack River Publications	1997	Hatrack River
A Convert’s Guide to Mormon Life	LDS / Non-fiction	A handy guide for investigators and new converts to the LDS church	Bookcraft	1998 (1)	Deseret Book
A Parents’ Survival Guide to the Internet	Non-fiction	What parents need to know to protect children in the Internet age	Bookcraft	1999 (1)
Food Storage for the Clueless	Non-fiction	How to start and maintain a successful food storage program	Bookcraft	1999 (1)	Amazon Books
On My Own and Clueless	Non-fiction	A guide for those living on their own for the first time	Bookcraft	2000 (1)	Deseret Book
Ward Activities for the Clueless	LDS / Non-fiction	Ideas for those tasked with planning LDS activities or events	Bookcraft	2001 (3)	Amazon Books
52 Weeks of Recipes for Students, Missionaries and Nervous Cooks	Non-fiction	Basic recipes and cooking skills for novice cooks	Deseret Book	2007 (1)	Deseret Book

Notes:

(1) Co-authored with Clark L. Kidd

(2) Co-authored with Orson Scott Card

(3) Co-authored with Clark L. Kidd and Kent and Shannon Pugmire

We here at the Association for Mormon Letters mourn the loss this beloved author. I hope others will correct or add to her life sketch, and leave their memorials.