Smith Club of San Francisco
and Marin
Alumnae Profiles
Lindy Hough '66
Winter 2006
Profile By Sarah Cross Mills '66
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. Launched in the mid-70's when many proponents of alternatives in the fields of health, exercise, spiritual development and science were hoping to effect change in the culture through their writing, North Atlantic and Frog now print 70 books a year and have become leading publishers of titles in these fields. There are also many books on sports, anthropology, the history of 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," says Lindy. "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", Lindy finds that writing 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 Denver Post's magazine. Lindy submitted a poem under an assumed name; her father unwittingly chose to print it. After she confessed to him, 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 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 dropped ballet, and with her mother and sister both graduates of Smith, Lindy decided to try college in the East.
Return to Top | Return to Profiles List
While at Smith, Lindy and Richard Grossinger, an Amherst student, founded 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. Over twenty years, moving the journal with them from state to state, Lindy and Richard (married soon after graduating) published 42 issues of Io, half with guest editors and with grant money from the National Endowment for the Arts. In its early years, Io was one of the most influential literary magazines of the school of poetry known as New American Poetry.
During the ten years after Smith, Lindy completed most of her coursework toward an MA and taught at a university in Michigan; spent a year on Mount Desert Island in Maine while Richard did anthropological field work for his doctorate; taught composition and literature courses at the University of Southern Maine for three years; and, along with receiving her MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College, she taught undergraduate women's literature and creative writing there and also directed and taught in fifteen rural schools with the Vermont Writers in the Schools Program during the five years she and Richard lived in Vermont.
Perhaps motivated by the realization that few female poets were publishing, 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 founding North Atlantic Books in the mid-70's. 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 after Lindy had been awarded a summer fellowship to study dance criticism at Mills College, 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 their home, Lindy contributed to editing, board management, publicity, book packing - whatever was needed. But her own writing and teaching remained her priorities. She wrote free-lance dance criticism, explored new ideas in essays and short fiction, and for a number of years taught at UC Berkeley's College of Engineering. She began with a writing course for all engineering majors and graduate students, then developed and taught in an engineering ethics program called "The Social Implications of Technology." This stands out as her most rewarding teaching experience, because of what she learned about the powerful influence engineers have on government in such critical areas as the environment, economy, technology, and military. Lindy took the opportunity to dig more deeply into her own thinking and writing about these issues during this time.
Return to Top | Return to Profiles List
In the mid-90's, with the children gone and the publishing company needing more of her attention, Lindy began fulltime work. This timing coincided with her completing coursework toward her Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Studies at the UC Berkeley School of Education, but the work at North Atlantic kept her from taking orals and writing her 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. Although she hasn't published since 1985, Lindy's followed her dictum of "keep the writing going" no matter what. She's working on the last draft of a novel called Radon Daughters and has a collection of short stories titled Wild Horse, Wild Dreams that will follow. 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 need for (and health effects of) mining uranium to build bombs, and some of the history of nuclear proliferation, an issue of great concern to her for 20 years.
Combining personal 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 managing acquisitions for North Atlantic and Frog, Lindy seeks authors who are innovators of new systems, writers who are the original source for knowledge in their field. 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 nearly a quarter century.
For more information, see www.LindyHough.com and www.northatlanticbooks.com
Return to Top | Return to Profiles List
