Alice Notley and Anselm Hollo had a close teacher-mentor relationship while Hollo was teaching at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. This mentorship led Notley to leave Iowa City for Morocco in 1968. When Notley returned to Iowa City, she met the poet Ted Berrigan, who had begun teaching as an instructor at the school that fall. She later married Berrigan and moved to Southampton, New York, where they lived in the garage of painter Larry Rivers.

Anselm Hollo remembered meeting Alice as a student in his class, in this interview:

I knew Alice before I ever met Ted, in person. I’d met him in New York, but like partying, and I only really met Ted and talked to him when he came to Iowa to teach for a year. But Alice had at that time been a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop for two years.