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(Evan Karp)

I met Lindy Hough almost immediately after moving to the Bay Area, in July of 2009. She was co-founder, with her husband Richard Grossinger, of North Atlantic Books in Berkeley, and served as co-publisher there until this past July, when she retired. Lindy and Richard founded North Atlantic Books as a consequence of their groundbreaking literary magazine Io, which they and friends started in 1964. Richard was a student at Amherst College and Lindy at Smith College, in Western Massachusetts. North Atlantic Books became a press-proper in 1974, two years before they moved to the Bay Area from Vermont (you can read this fascinating story in its entirety here).

But these publishing pursuits sprang from the pure and earnest need to write, which Lindy began as a child and has continued these many years, despite establishing and overseeing the successful non-profit niche-publishing house and raising a wonderful family (I can vouch for these, having both interned at North Atlantic for 11 months and met their very talented and kind children Robin Grossinger and Miranda July).

This month, North Atlantic Books will be releasing the 3^rd in its Io Poetry Series: Lindy’s new and selected poems Wild Horses, Wild Dreams. This interview was conducted in conjunction with a profile to be published soon by SF Weekly; what follows is the first of two parts. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a microphone. Feel good about yourself. Anything is possible. Go out and do what you think you can do. Change your life. Become the person you want to sleep with. OK. Become the person you want to sleep with every night. Hm. Become the person you want to sleep with most nights? No. Become the person you want to champion. Yes. Become the voice that you would amplify. Nietzsche: “Become who you are.”

What was Quiet Lightning 11? Depends who you ask. It was the first time Matthew James DeCoster ever read in public and the first time he was published. That’s a story. It was the first time we ever made love in a bookstore and the first time our show was ever broadcast in real time over the internet. Imagine. The first time we sold out of sPARKLE & bLINK before the show started. It was the first time anyone from my family ever saw Quiet Lightning.

But it was more than just first times. Again, it was spoken by numerous people: these shows keep getting better every time. How? Could that possibly be? Read the rest of this entry »