Richard Grossinger: Biography

Richard Grossinger

A native of New York City, Richard Grossinger was born November 3, 1944, and grew up in Manhattan, living at 96th Street and Park Avenue until age twelve and Central Park and 90th from age twelve till the end of high school.  During elementary-school years he had his stepfather’s surname and was known as Richard Towers.  He attended P.S. 6, Bill-Dave Group, and Camp Chipinaw and then, with his new name, began taking the subway to Horace Mann School in Riverdale in 1956.  A student there for six years until he graduated in 1962, he began writing in Kingsley Ervin’s creative-writing class in 1960, a seminar that also spawned his lifelong association with Charles Stein (and in which Stein initiated his peers in tarot cards and the poetry of Charles Olson).

After being introduced to his father Paul at age nine, Grossinger spent considerable time at his resort hotel, Grossinger’s, a place that figures prominently in his early mythology.  At age thirty he learned that his mother had conceived him by an affair and neither his stepfather nor his legal father was his genetic father.  He never met his genetic father (Bernard “Bingo” Brandt).

Grossinger graduated from Amherst College in June 1966 with a B.A. in English.  That same month in Denver he married Lindy Hough who attended Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, near Amherst.

His odd jobs through college included editing the Kenmont Clarion at a summer camp in Kent, Connecticut (1961); working in his father’s hotel’s mail room in Ferndale, New York (1963); serving as a reporter for The Sullivan County Democrat in Callicoon, New York (1964); and bussing tables and cleaning the bar at Sunnie’s Rendez Vous in Aspen, Colorado (1965).

He received a Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Michigan for an ethnography investigating relationships between economic and ecological aspects of fishing communities in Eastern Maine.  He conducted his fieldwork from Mount Desert Island in 1969-1970, going east as far as Maces Bay, New Brunswick, and west as far as Brunswick, Maine.  He completed his degree and thesis defense in 1975, ecological anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport serving as his advisor and committee chairman.

In the years 1970-1972 he taught anthropology at two campuses: the University of Maine at Portland and Gorham State Teachers College.  In 1971 he wrote a position paper for founding a Department of Anthropology-Geography when the two schools merged as the University of Maine at Portland-Gorham (now the University of Southern Maine).

For five years beginning in 1972 he taught interdisciplinary topics at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont, including courses entitled: Dreams; Ethnoastronomy; Freud, Reich, and Jung; Herman Melville, Charles Olson, and the Ethnography of Whaling; Physical Anthropology; Classical Greek; Creative Writing; Twentieth-Century European and American Novels; and Alchemy, Astrology and Totemism.

He taught a one-month course on Hesiod’s Theogony at Kent State University in Ohio in 1973 and was briefly on the faculty of the short-lived Pacific College of Naturopathic Medicine in 1978.

In 1964, with his then-girlfriend Lindy Hough and the assistance of high-school friend Charles Stein, poet-mentor Robert Kelly, and Amherst buddy Nelson Richardson, he started Io, a literary and esoteric journal.  Io formed the basis of North Atlantic Books, which he and Hough inaugurated in 1974 in Vermont.  Io published 23 autonomous issues through 1976 before merging with North Atlantic and converting its collections to anthologies thereafter. 

North Atlantic Books started in Plainfield, Vermont, as a purely literary press, publishing poets like Diane di Prima, Gerrit Lansing, and Theodore Enslin. After Grossinger and Hough moved from Vermont to Berkeley, California, in 1977, they incorporated the press as a 501c3 nonprofit in order to receive arts-endowment grants.

In the early years in Berkeley, Grossinger received advances from Doubleday Anchor and Sierra Club Books to write what became the first editions of Planet Medicine and The Night Sky. Writing Planet Medicine while studying t’ai chi ch’uan and homeopathy, Grossinger decided to expand the range of North Atlantic Books to include alternative medicine, internal martial arts, and anthropology. This ultimately encompassed bodywork (somatics), shamanism, general metaphysics, “forbidden” science, and numerous other topics.

During those same years, he managed Barbary Coast Distribution Company with novelist Ishmael Reed and participated in various other collaborative Bay Area indy press endeavors, including coordinating books for San Quentin Prison. He also coedited a literary anthology, an Io carryover (issue 24), Baseball I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life with University of Delaware professor Kevin Kerrane. North Atlantic sold the project to Anchor where it became Baseball Diamonds Tales, Traces, Visions, and Voodoo from a Native American Rite. These compilations gave rise to further baseball-literature anthologizing.

Grossinger worked from home as publisher of North Atlantic Books until 1993 when it was moved to an office space in West Berkeley. During that time (1977-1993), it grew to fifty new titles a year. After hiring staff, increasing staff  size, and moving three times to larger quarters, North Atlantic reached a maximum of almost a hundred new titles a year with distribution by Random House.

Grossinger and Hough served as the copublishers from 1974 till Hough retired in 2010,. After that, Grossinger continued as publisher until 2014. Then his title became Founding Publisher and he served mainly as an acquisitions editor and consultant until January 2020 when he and the staff and board of North Atlantic Books parted ways.

In February 2020, Grossinger became the curator of a new imprint at Inner Traditions International, Sacred Planet Books. A description of its list is elsewhere on this site.

Grossinger is the author of many books including Planet Medicine, The Night Sky, Embryogenesis, New Moon, Migraine Auras, On the Integration of Nature, Dark Pool of Light, The Bardo of Waking Life, and Bottoming Out the Universe.  His writing can be divided into three  categories: general experimental prose; books on topics in science viewed ontologically, cross-culturally, and in terms of pop culture; and nonfiction novels.  All of the work arises through a literary sensibility.

He read and spoke at a number of institutions, mainly during the seventies, including: University of California at Santa Cruz, SUNY New Paltz, Franconia College, Kent State University, the Chicago Poetry Festival, West Virginia University, Keyser State University, St. Marks Church, San Francisco State, JFK University, and College of the Atlantic.

Grossinger studied tarot through Builders of the Adytum during the sixties; t’ai chi ch’uan with Andy Shapiro, Carolyn Smithson, Paul Pitchford, Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, Martin Inn, Peter Ralston, and Ron Sieh, respectively, for a period from the mid-seventies through the late nineties; hsing-i with Ron Sieh; craniosacral therapy for three years under Randy Cherner and then through the Upledger Institute during the early nineties; and chi gung with Paul Weiss during the aughts.  During the seventies and early eighties he did dreamwork with Charles Poncé, bioenergetic therapy with Ian Grand, Lomi work with Polly Gamble, and gestalt and movement work with Richard Strozzi Heckler.  He also took Breema classes from Manocher Movlai (the nineties) and yoga classes from Patricia Fox (the aughts).  More recently he studied psychic energy and healing at the Berkeley Psychic Institute (2008-2009) and then continued his psychic studies under Sethian John Friedlander.  From 2009 through 2014 and from 2020 on, he coordinated a psychic study group  in Maine.

Grossinger has rooted  for the New York Mets (baseball) since 1962, the New York Jets (American football) since 1967, and the New Jersey Nets (basketball) since 1984.  As a child he rooted for the New York Yankees but dropped them for good in 1967.  He rooted for the New York Rangers during high school and now roots for the Ottawa Senators (hockey).

His and Lindy Hough’s children are Robin Grossinger (born 1969), an environmental scientist at the San Francisco Estuary Institute, and Miranda July (born 1974), a performance artist, writer, and film director.

From 2001 till 2014 Grossinger and Hough lived about three-quarters of the year outside Berkeley, California, and the rest in Manset, Maine, near where he did his anthropology fieldwork with fishermen. They currently live in Bar Harbor and Portland, Maine.