We are saddened to announce the passing on Sunday, July 17th, of Linda Hunter Adams, an editor and teacher of editing for many decades within the Mormon community, at the age of 75. She also served as AML president in 2006-2007.
Linda was the director of the BYU Humanities Publications Center, and taught publishing and editing at BYU. She was noteworthy for the many students she mentored and the encouragement she gave to student publications.
Her BYU faculty bio reads: “Mrs. Adams has been an editor with the church publications and for Peregrine Smith, a national trade book publisher. She has worked on projects with Deseret Book, Bookcraft, Aspen, and numerous university and commercial presses. She is editor of Encyclia (the journal for the Utah Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters), managing editor for Literature and Belief, production editor for The Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, editor of the Benson Institute Review, and former associate editor of BYU Studies. Linda Hunter Adams has taken the Stanford Publishing Course. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Brigham Young University, minoring in journalism and majoring in English. Focusing on Victorian literature, she centered her work around Thomas Hardy.”
Of her teaching and literary career, her obituary read, “An associate professor at BYU for 30 years, Linda taught English and editing, and influenced thousands of students. She was director of the Humanities Publications Center, where she produced hundreds of books and journals. She was associate editor of BYU Studies for 15 years. She managed student journals, including Inscape and The Leading Edge, and helped organize conferences, including Life, the Universe, and Everything. She was an editor for Pioneer Magazine and also spent a number of years working on the Joseph Smith Papers.”
Her obituary is here, including details about the funeral (11:00 a.m. Saturday) and the viewings, which will be Friday night from 6-8 and Saturday morning for an hour prior to the funeral.
We invite those who knew Linda to share your memories.
One of the challenges of sharing news about Linda during her final months was that she was a part of so many diverse communities. There was no single place to let people know how she was doing — no ten places to do so. Similarly, I know there are many other places where people have poured out their own memories about Linda. But it is fitting that we do so here as well, since this was one of the communities she was a part of and served, not only (or even primarily) through her formal membership in the organization, but through everything she did to encourage writing and publishing in the Mormon community, and especially among her students at BYU.
My first encounter with AML was as a student of Linda’s, some ten or fifteen years before I ever got involved in AML-List, going with her to the annual meeting to work the publications table. At the time, I think she was officially affiliated only with BYU Studies, but she would cheerfully take and sell copies of all the other publications she was (less officially) involved with, and pretty much anyone else who asked her as well. (Working the table at Education Week was really interesting. I remember one time we had copies of The Leading Edge, BYU’s semi-grudgingly-tolerated student sf&f magazine, on the table, when a woman stopped by and harangued us about Dungeons and Dragons, which, she informed us, the General Authorities had been investigating and would come out against shortly. I don’t think I was imagining the subtext that they had *better* do so.)
Linda could be frustrating to work with. Her extreme generosity in taking on projects and willingness to work with and encourage everyone (especially students) who wanted to launch any kind of publication sometimes drove to distraction those who were waiting for her promised help on long-delayed projects. Unfortunately, those who showed up in person were those who got her attention. She started working late nights in part because that was when she could get work done with fewer interruptions. (I have vivid memories of her son Nathan sleeping under her desk while she worked far into the night.) It was nerve-racking to be one of her interns when people came by wanting to know when they could find Linda in her office, and not knowing what to tell them. (I once made the mistake of saying, in response to such a query, that I had no idea when she would be in. It got back to Linda’s bosses, as I recall, which was uncomfortable for us all. What can I say? I was a young, dumb intern.) She would take on projects even when her supervisors had explicitly forbidden her to do so, and then do her best to keep them from finding out. It wasn’t that she didn’t care about deadlines and such; in fact, I think sometimes that she cared too deeply. But she couldn’t let go of things, even when she was completely overworked.
She provided a space for everyone, whether or not it was part of her official responsibilities, and whether or not she had official approval. When one of those who was working on The Leading Edge became an intern for BYU Studies, she let us use the typesetting machine to put out a higher quality product. Because we didn’t have official permission to be there, we had to work mostly after hours (BYU Studies and Inscape, BYU’s “official” student literary journal, both had priority on use of the machine), which started my own habit of latenight publication work. More than once, I believe, Linda got a call from BYU Security when a janitor came into the office to find me sleeping on the (actually quite comfortable) couch in the conference room where she would meet with authors, and where The Leading Edge would have our staff meetings on Saturdays.
She never became directly involved in editing The Leading Edge, nor as far as I am aware in running the sf&f symposium. Instead, she provided us with a space, and gave many of us training — and jobs, when she could.
She was a fount of wisdom and accumulated lore, both about publishing in general and about issues in the BYU scholarly and writing community. Her anecdotes about helping to edit the conference edition of the Ensign and working with various well-known BYU administrators and Mormon scholars were always entertaining and often educational, but never — as many at her funeral yesterday pointed out — mean-spirited. She had a high sensitivity for what would and would not pass with both Church leaders and BYU administration (one she failed to pass on fully to all her students, to her dismay). She was a voice not only for correctness (in a Chicago Manual of Style sense), but also for careful scholarship (her insistence on source checking was legendary) and preserving the voice of the author when changes needed to be made.
Linda’s faith was deep but not blind, her intellect lively and engaged, her disposition charitable and generous to a fault. Much as she was an editor, she was a teacher even more, and never more so than when she was editing. She opened up her heart and mind to share herself, her family, what she knew, and who she was with others. She always listened and was interested in what “her kids” were doing. She changed my life on both a personal and professional level, and I am the better for it.
You’ve painted her well, Jonathan. She was a lovely, lovely woman.