Interview with Lindy Hough, Smith ’66, by Sarah Cross Mills, San Francisco -Marin Smith Club Newsletter, 2005
A few blocks north of the busy shops on Berkeley’s Fourth Street, there’s an enticing sandwich board on the sidewalk, inviting passers-by to visit the “bookstore” filled with hundreds of volumes published by North Atlantic Books and Frog, Ltd., the two publishing companies founded by Lindy Hough and her husband Richard Grossinger. These companies thrive because of their catalogue of niche market non-fiction titles begun in the mid-70s when personal growth and alternative health, martial arts, bodywork, psychology, and spiritual development were maturing and emerging as the “counter-culture,” an entirely new way of looking at human transformation. North Atlantic Books was and Frog now publish 70-80 books a year and have become leading publishers of titles in these fields. There are also many books on sports, anthropology and cultural studies, speculative science, and women’s issues.
For Lindy, despite being Co-Publisher and Editorial Director, the business is “just her day job,” a livelihood that has allowed her to pursue her passion as a writer. Writing “…makes life bearable and more valuable. I like the transmutation, the alchemical properties and valuable substance that result,” she says. “My writing…has asserted an attempt to reckon with reality,” a reality that is not always satisfying, but through the artistic “play with the conventions of language,” brings great excitement and fulfillment to her life.
The roots of this passion lie in her childhood, when her father edited a poetry page in the Sunday Denver Post’s Empire magazine. At about eleven, Lindy once submitted a poem under an assumed name; her father and his colleagues unwittingly chose to print it. She confessed to him and he laughed; he was always very supportive of her writing. Eight years of her youth were also consumed by ballet, the beauty and bodily sensations of its movements. Ballet might have remained her focus (and kept her from attending a liberal arts college), but she began to experience mental blocks to remembering the lengthy combinations of steps. Introduced to modern dance and theater at the renowned Perry-Mansfield Performing Arts Camp in Steamboat Springs, Lindy moved away from ballet. Her mother and sister had both gone to Smith, and Lindy decided to try college in the East.
While at Smith, Lindy and Richard Grossinger, an Amherst student, founded with friends from Mt. Holyoke and U. Mass an alternative literary magazine titled Io. They believed that writing was integral with history, science and the arts, so each issue included these along with poetry, critiques and other non-fiction. Marrying soon after graduating, Richard and Lindy moved the journal with them from Maine to Vermont to California eventually publishing 42 issues of Io, many with guest editors and funds from the National Endowment for the Arts. Lindy’s own issue was Io/19, “Mind, Memory and Psyche,” published in 1974 in Plainfield, Vt.. Io became an influential literary magazine known for publishing poets especially in the Olson-Duncan-identified New American Poetry school in the late 60s and 70s.
After Smith, Lindy completed coursework toward an MA at Eastern Michigan University, and taught at EMU, leaving to spent a winter on Mount Desert Island in Maine while Richard did anthropological field work for his doctorate. She taught composition and literature courses at the University of Southern Maine for three years; and, finished the MA in Creative Writing at Goddard College (just before MFA degrees were given). At Goddard she taught women’s literature and creative writing, directed the Vermont Council on the Arts’ Writers in the Schools Program for a few years, and taught in fifteen rural schools as a poet during the five years she and Richard lived in Vermont.
Lindy brought out three books of poetry while at Goddard. “My poems are about people, children, the conventions society imposes on people and the ways in which they struggle to birth some individuation.” Now parents of two children, Lindy’s and Richard’s ideas about many alternatives to social conventions seem to have solidified during these years in northern New England. Ten years into nurturing their literary magazine, it was a natural step to found North Atlantic Books in the mid-70s. The time was ripe for an independent publishing company that sought to bring new voices and new lifestyle elements into the mainstream culture.
California visits had been a respite from harsh Vermont winters, and in 1975 Lindy was awarded a summer fellowship to study dance criticism at Mills College with New York dance critic Marcia B. Siegel. It wasn’t long before the family of four decided to move to Berkeley. For the first fifteen years while running the business out of different houses in Oakland, Richmond, and Berkeley, Lindy edited the books, worked with the Board of Directors, did publicity, customer service, and packed books – whatever was needed. North Atlantic joined Emeryville distributor Publishers Group West in 1981, a relationshop that last twenty six years.
But her own writing and teaching remained her priorities. She wrote free-lance dance criticism, explored new ideas in essays and short fiction, and taught Technical Writing and The Social Implications of Technology at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering. The writing course was for all engineering majors and graduate students; the engineering ethics course was in collaboration with other engineering faculty. The SIT course stands out as her one of her most rewarding teaching experiences, because she was able to widen the world of student engineers about social responsibility, the effects of their projects on the environment, and debate questions of fiscal and ethical responsibility. Lindy took the opportunity to dig more deeply into her own thinking and writing about these issues during this time.
In the late 80s and early 90s, as her children grew older, Lindy began graduate work for a Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Studies. After completing four years of course work the publishing company needed her attention full-time. In 1994 she left the graduate work before orals, field work, and the dissertation. Although there’s regret in her voice when she talks about this, she accepts the choice she made – and, of course, she couldn’t neglect her own writing. Lindy followed her dictum of “keep the writing going” no matter what. She’s now working on the last draft of a novel called Loving Cinnamon Blue and a collection of short stories. The novel is a family drama set against the backdrop of the first uranium boom in Colorado: Lindy tackles topics of infidelity, same sex relationships, the health effects of uranium mining on the Navaho Indians, and what the West was like as the atomic age took hold in the early 50s.
Combining writing and publishing others’ work places Lindy in a long tradition of women who have done just this. Think of Virginia Woolf. The fit is a hand-in-glove kind of relationship. In acquiring books for North Atlantic and Frog, Lindy seeks authors who are innovators of new systems, writer/practitioners who are the original source for knowledge in their field, be it bodywork, martial arts, yoga, or alternative health. How much easier it must be to recognize fresh language and direct experience in another’s writing when your own creative drive is producing the very same qualities.
It’s likely that Lindy’s future published works will, in their own way, help to move the culture into new areas, just as North Atlantic Books and Frog, Ltd. have been doing for more than thirty years.