Lindy Hough was still a student at Smith College when she met Richard Grossinger who attended Amherst. Together, they endeavored to create an interdisciplinary magazine to highlight writers who attended one of four schools in the Pioneer Valley area. They created Io, which ran from 1965 to 1977. Io travelled with them after college and grew to eventually publish books under Io Books. Hough and Grossinger incorporated North Atlantic Books (1974-present) in 1981 years after their move to Berkeley, California. Io published poets such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Joanne Kyger, Bernadette Meyer, and more.
On how “a journal is a home for the work”
A journal is a home for the work, much as books are. Domestic life does not influence me overly, any more than for men – we don’t expect to read about domestic life in Moby Dick. It’s the backdrop, much as it is in Dickens or Turgenev. My work has close personal poems and poems more influenced by content. When I lived in Berkeley and taught at UC Berkeley I attended lectures by philosophy faculty on Wittgenstein and Alfred North Whitehead’s Process and Reality. Ideas and content from philosophy are useful in poems. I intuited from the sad ends of women poets I admired (Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath) that a poet needed subject matter outside one’s self. The poems usually mix the natural world, history, geography, with conceptual or intellectual thoughts.
On advice for young women interested in self-publishing:
One of the things we haven’t touched on is the importance of reading your work and performing it out loud to people, giving readings of your work, having a blog, and reading/performing your work on YouTube and Instagram. When you publish a book, you have to do marketing and publicity for it. One thing that helped us as writers was to develop a network of writer friends around the country whom we could link up with to perform our work and sell books. I would definitely invite writers to come to wherever you’re teaching or going to school and read their work; there is absolutely nothing like hearing a writer’s work read by the author in person.
