Ballet, age 10

Biography

Lindy Hough was born in Denver in 1944. She was named after the Linden tree in her parents’ backyard. The main thing that occupied her from 8-16 was ballet, which she stopped as she discovered modern dance and then theater: acting, playwriting. At Smith College she found herself unable to adapt to Martha Graham technique and plunged into writing, not too sad to leave dancing behind. She met Richard Grossinger at Amherst and founded with friends a literary magazine called Io, in which she published her own work and other friends.

After graduating from Smith in 1966 she married Richard Grossinger and the two moved to Ann Arbor, where she taught at Eastern Michigan University for three years and worked on a Master’s in English. She and Grossinger traveled to Maine (with Robin, then three months) to do Richard’s anthropology fieldwork on the ecology and economics of lobster fishing on Mt. Desert Island, ME in the winter of 1960–1970.

They moved down to Portland (Cape Elizabeth) in the spring of 1970, where Hough taught writing and composition at the University of Maine at Portland. In 1973 they moved to Plainfield, Vermont, where both taught at Goddard College. Hough taught poetry and women’s literature, and began writing prose, making a gradual transition to stories and fiction, with a long novel about Plainfield which was never published. She finished the M.A. at Goddard in 1970, working with field faculty member Robert Bertholf, of Kent State University, a prominent critic and writer on New American poetry. This was before Goddard began giving the MFA degree and it was criticism: a close reading of the first six poems of Charles Olson’s The Maxiumus Poems and a comparison of the poetics of three women poets, Denise Levertov, Diane Wakoski, and Joanne Kyger. She published three books of poetry in the Plainfield years. She directed the Vermont Writer’s in the Schools Program from 1974-1976 and taught in fifteen Vermont elementary and secondary schools as a writer, and began writing free lance pieces for local magazines and newspapers. In 1975 she accepted a fellowship to a training conference on dance criticism taught by Marcia Siegel at Mills College on a grant from the Vermont Arts Council. Goddard laid off half its faculty in 1976, and the family moved to Berkeley where the early books of North Atlantic Books were having success with Bookpeople.

Lindy and Henry W. Hough in front of 1151 Humboldt, Denver, age 5

Northern California with its lively artistic scene was a welcome break from the arduous winters of Vermont. Hough wrote about dance and arts for numerous small magazines and newspapers, but ultimately stopped it to focus on her own writing.

As North Atlantic Books grew and began to publish non-fiction, Hough worked in non-profit administration, teaching, and publishing, even for a time for another publisher as West Coast Editor for Shambhala Publications when it moved from Berkeley to Boulder in 1983. For the first fifteen years of publishing, North Atlantic was published from all the houses they inhabited in Berkeley, which means that their children grew up amid authors, editors and book-packers, sometimes packing jiffy bags with books themselves. Hough edited many of the early books and worked in all the parts of the business, including running the board and grant writing.

In 1984 Hough began teaching Technical Writing in the College of Engineering at Berkeley. On the face of it this was a bread-and-butter job well-suited for a book editor and teacher of writing. In actuality it became a way to more fully explore topics in her own writing and thinking involving engineering ethics, sustainable development and globalization, and the proliferation and build-up of nuclear armaments. She founded an upper-division course with other faculty called “The Social Implications of Technology” in the College of Engineering and taught it for three years, subsequently beginning doctoral work in 1990 in Social and Cultural Studies in Education at UC Berkeley.

In 1994 she joined North Atlantic Books and Frog, Ltd. full-time as Publisher and Editorial Director, a position she holds presently. During the last ten years she has been working on stories and the novel Loving Cinnamon Blue.

Hough lives in Kensington, California with her husband, writer Richard Grossinger. Their son Robin, a biologist at San Francisco Estuary Institute, lives with his wife Erica Wandner and their son Leo in nearby Berkeley; their daughter Miranda July, a film-maker and performance artist, lives in Los Angeles. Miranda’s first feature film, “Me and You and Everyone We Know” was released in June 2005.

Books
Poetry: Changing Woman (1971), Psyche (1975), The Sun In Cancer (1975), Outlands and Inlands (1978). Non-fiction anthology: co-editor of Nuclear Strategy and The Code of the Warrior: Faces of Mars and Shiva in the Crisis of Human Survival 1981.

Journalism
Dance and performance criticism, feature writing, and book reviewing in American Book Review, City Magazine, Mother Jones, San Francisco Review of Books, Soho Weekly News, Berkeley Barb, Contact II, Yoga Journal.

Poems and stories published in
Caterpillar, Truck, Io, Tooth of Time Review (John Brandi), Llama’s Almanac, Toothpick, Lisbon, & The Orcas Islands (Michael Wiater), Is., (Penny Chalmers), Six-pack (Pierre Joris).

Forthcoming
Loving Cinnamon Blue (novel)
Wild Horses, Wild Dreams (stories)