The Montreal spoken-word artist Catherine Kidd has developed a cult following over the past 10 years, not only through her live performance-art pieces but through her publishing output as well. Her first book-and-CD package, everything I know about love I learned from taxidermy, was a modest hit for Conundrum Press in 1996, and it encouraged them to publish three subsequent book-and-CDs, the most recent of which was last September’s Bipolar Bear. Though each of those titles consisted largely of repurposed performance material, they helped earn Kidd some high-profile fans in both local and national media.

This spring, Conundrum will be publishing Kidd’s debut novel, Missing the Ark, about a young Vancouver woman fighting to maintain custody of her daughter. Though a traditional prose work may appear to be a new direction for Kidd, it turns out she’s been working on this project longer than on almost any of the others. “The gestation of Missing the Ark rivals that of an elephant, and birthing the thing has been close to that excruciating,” says Kidd.

The long saga began back in 1996, when Patrick Crean, then an editor at the now-defunct Somerville House Books, read and heard the just-released everything I know about love. Impressed, he immediately offered Kidd a contract for a full-length prose work. Kidd hadn’t put much thought into doing a novel prior to that, but an idea for a semi-autobiographical story planted itself in her brain, and she got down to work.

While Kidd toiled away on Bestial Rooms (as it was then called), Crean cycled through new jobs: in 1998 he moved from Somerville to Key Porter; then, 18 months later, he became publisher of Thomas Allen & Sons’ new homegrown imprint. And everywhere Crean went, Kidd’s contract went, too. According to Andy Brown, Kidd’s publisher at Conundrum, all the moving around was rather hard on her. “I believe she was a bit lost in the shuffle,” says Brown. “And [through] no fault of Mr. Crean, Catherine became disoriented with the novel after finishing a first draft.”

Kidd corroborates Brown’s account but also insists that the subject matter of the novel caused problems, too. “The father character in the novel is fairly like my father, who died around the same time I began the book,” says Kidd, “so there was a lot of digging around in my own personal psychic basement, which took me to places I might not have been ready to look.” After six years of wrestling with the material, Kidd says she actually began to feel herself unravel a little. “The process of writing the book had become so solitary that I was a bit concerned I had moved into a fictional universe and could not remember where the exit was,” she explains. So she turned to performance work again and another book-and-CD title, Sea Peach (which contained some material adapted from the Bestial Rooms manuscript).

That might have been the end of it, but after a few years’ break, Kidd gave Bestial Rooms another look and decided to take a second go at it. She knew, however, that she would need to make one decisive change if she wanted to complete it: she would have to take it to Conundrum. “I have nothing ill-willed to say about Patrick Crean and my previous publishing houses, but it had been difficult to discuss editorial notes over the phone with a Toronto editor whom I had never met,” explains Kidd. “Meanwhile, I’d done a bunch of different publications with Andy at Conundrum, and I already knew him really well.”

By this point, Crean was more than willing to free Kidd from her contract. “Only one set of revisions occurred over 10 years – 10 years! – which we deemed to be unsatisfactory,” says Crean. So he accepted Brown’s offer of half of Kidd’s original advance in return for full rights to the manuscript.

The directness and tangibility of the editing process with Andy was probably what saved me, and [what saved] the book from chewing off its own fingers and toes,” says Kidd. And now that the final product, retitled Missing the Ark, is off to the printers, Kidd says she’s actually happy with it. “It’s a book I would love to read myself, if I hadn’t spent so much time writing the damn thing!”