Finding Lost Voices: Fearless Poet Alta and Her Revolutionary Shameless Hussy Press

A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered.

In college, I came home to California over the summer and took a class from Berkeley Extension, where I worked one-on-one with an instructor on my poetry. It was a great gift. I remember driving across the Richmond Bridge to my sessions in Berkley, watching the seagulls oscillate in flight alongside my car with lines from Walt Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” echoing in my mind

I too many and many a time cross’d the river of old,

Watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls, saw them high in the air floating with
motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,

Most of my schooling up to that point had been on the East Coast, so I hadn’t been exposed to many Bay Area writers (hence a poem about a ferry in Brooklyn echoing in my mind while crossing a bridge in Northern California). My instructor told me to read Jack Spicer, and when I did, his work just about blew my mind. Here was a writer who swam daily in the bay’s cold waters at Aquatic Park and wrote in a way I’d never encountered, one that dragged me into the depths of that cold water with him. I consumed After Lorca, its instructional letters, and other Bay Area poets published by White Rabbit Press and Auerhahn Books. All works that broke literary and social rules. But what I didn’t notice at the time was that nearly every single book I was recommended was written by a white male. I didn’t notice likely because my entire education had been like this — so few poets I was encouraged to read were female. I didn’t know then, but I know now that the Bay Area was home to the first feminist press in the United States: Shameless Hussy Press, which published over fifty titles in its twenty-year tenure from 1969 - 1989. Since her death last year, I’ve become increasingly aware of the work Alta Gerrey (1942 - 2024) did to allow women to publish their work in an almost entirely male-dominated publishing scene.

Alta was born in Reno, NV, in 1942. Her family ran a piano store out of their home. When she was twelve, she and her family moved to Castro Valley in the San Francisco Bay Area so that her brother could attend the California School for the Blind (both her father and brother were blind). Alta went to UC Berkeley but dropped out to teach in Prince Edward County in Virginia, where public schools were shut down in an attempt to block school integration.

Back in the Bay Area, Alta wrote, married, divorced, and gave birth to her daughter. She lived with the poet John Oliver Simon, who taught her how to use a hand press to print work. As she remembers about Simon, “I saw him publish and print his own books….When I realized that all you had to do was put paper in a printing press and have it come out and fold it, and call it something . . . if you did that for eight pieces of paper, folded them, and called it something, it was a book. So I learned how to make a book.” After leaving Simon, Alta moved to Oakland, where she organized a commune for women escaping abusive marriages. It’s in this female community that the idea for Shameless Hussy Press truly began.

Alta realized that getting published as a woman was nearly impossible unless you were published by your husband or boyfriend (at the time, 94% of the poetry was published by men). When she spoke with her female friends, she heard that they, too, could not get published:

“I couldn’t get published except by my ex-husband. Susie [Susan] Griffin couldn’t get published. I knew she was a great poet. Pat Parker couldn’t get published and I knew she was a great poet….I had been reading Anaïs Nin’s diaries, and I knew that she and Henry Miller had made books on a letterpress. When I found out that the only person who would publish me was my ex-husband, and no one would publish Susie, and no one would publish Pat, I thought, I think I can do this.”

And so she came up with a crazy idea. What if she were to become the publisher? When asked why she named the press Shameless Hussy, Alta answered, “Because my mother used that term for women she didn’t approve of, and no one approved of what I was doing.”

Alta gathered the work of ten women poets and printed 250 copies of the press's first chapbook, Remember Our Fire. She brought those books to all of the bookstores in the Bay Area, and two bookstores agreed to carry them: Cody’s Books and Up Haste. Within six months, those 250 copies sold out. But change rarely comes easily. As the success of the press increased, Alta began to receive death threats, “People threatened to destroy my press, my physical AB Dick 360 offset press.” So she moved the press and her daughter to a safer suburban location. But she continued to publish the works of women.

For the first five years, Alta printed all of the books on her AB Dick 360 press and assembled them by hand, then “physically shlepped them around” by bus to the bookstores. Titles that Shameless Hussy Press published include: Ntozake Shange’s, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf, Susan Griffin’s The Sink and dear sky, Pat Parker’s first book, Child of Myself, Mitsuye Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Poems. Other striking titles include Calamity Jane’s Letters to Her Daughter and a reprint of George Sand’s The Haunted Pool which had gone out of print.

To get a sense for who Alta was circa 1974, I suggest you watch this video of her reading her powerful work at San Francisco State.

I’ve crossed over many bridges since I took that class and discovered the work of Jack Spicer so many years ago. Now, thankfully, there is a new chorus of voices echoing in my mind as I drive across. The chorus of reclaimed women’s voices. I hope you’ll start hearing them, too.

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Riding Like the Wind Book Tour

This week I’ll be reading in San Francisco, Davis, Berkeley and Oakland! I hope to see you there!

November 18, 5:30 PM - Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb - The Book Club of California | 47 Kearny Street | Suite 400 | San Francisco, CA 94108 (Attend in-person) (Attend online)

November 19, 4:30 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle in conversation with Matthew Stratton UC Davis Manetti Shrem Museum - 254 Old Davis Road, Davis, CA 95616

November 20, 5:00 PM Book Talk with Author Iris Jamahl Dunkle on “Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb” UC Berkeley, English Department (Wheeler Hall, Room 300)

November 21, 7:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle and Forrest Gander in Conversation - Clio’s Books, 353 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA 94610

December

December 1, 2:00 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Kristen Hanlon at the Alameda Library, Alameda, CA

December 11, 6:30 PM - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Lisa Moore, Book Woman, Austin, TX

January 2025

January 24 - Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH

January 25 - Reading with Jan Beatty at White Whale Books in Pittsburgh, PA

January 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle in Conversation with Donovan Hohn at Literati in Ann Arbor, MI

January 28 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle at Morgenstern Books, Bloomington, Indiana

February

February 21, Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s talk at New York University, New York, NY

February 26, 6:00 PM Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at King's English, Salt Lake City, UT

February 27 - Iris Jamahl Dunkle reads at American West Center, Salt Lake City, UT

March

March 5 - The Bill Lane Center for the American West: Stanford, CA

March 6 - UC Boulder/Center for the West, online lecture.

March 13- 5:00 PM Garden City Community College, Kansas

March 14 - Books and Books in Key West, FL

March 21 - 2:00 PM New York Public Library, New York City

May

May 17 - 5:30 - 7:30 PM - National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, CA