Pia Hinckle

About

Writing. Editing. Small Business. Swimming


Current Project


Sorry for the Fu#k You:
A Daughter-Father Memoir of Drink, Ink & Catholicism


My earliest memories are of newspaper headlines, magazine layouts, and the sound of my father’s typewriter. He showed me how to make a perfect screwdriver at age 7, raised me with all the freedom of a man in bars all over San Francisco, and hosted my 21st birthday at The Mitchell Brothers’ O’Farrell Theatre strip club. He taught me to not be afraid of the world of men. I joined him in the world of journalism, which gave us a common language. Then he fired me for trying to make him keep a deadline.

My father Warren Hinckle has been called a muckraker, an iconoclast, a pirate, a radical, a contrarian, a character, a madman, a drunk, and a shit-disturber. He was a journalist, an editor, a publisher, entrepreneur and guerrilla marketer who changed magazine journalism, design, and promotion in the 60s and 70s, publishing the photos that turned Martin Luther King Jr. against the Vietnam War and Hunter Thompson’s first piece of Gonzo journalism. He was also a a magical and mischievous father, of two daughters and a son.

Built at the intersection of their shared drinking, journalism, and Catholicism, their relationship was continually disrupted by Warren’s shenanigans and betrayals (aka “fuck-yous” in their shared language), all remembered as Pia races to pull off one of San Francisco’s biggest funerals before her father’s long-suffering girlfriend can make good on her threat to cremate him and run off with his ashes.


Would you forgive a charming bamboozler who was also your dad? Sorry for the Fu#k You is the story of how one extraordinary daughter-father duo navigated their tumultuous relationship and survived to the last call. 

Excerpts

Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, November 2023, Friends issue (audio version, read by me, included):
Hollapeno

Alta Journal fall 2022 issue: “I’d Like a Catholic Diaphragm, Please“

DIAPHRAGM Alta for PiaDownload

Latest Words

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Books

Cover of The Court That Tamed the West

California’s First Court

Writing

The Northern District Court established U.S. federal law in California after its admission to the union in 1850. It sorted the Spanish and Mexican land grants, ruled on shanghaied sailors and bully captains, the Chinese Exclusion Laws, and gave a framework for the state’s growth into the world’s fifth largest economy.

Co-authored with Richard Cahan and Jessica Royer Ocken. I researched and wrote about the court’s early years, from 1851-1905.

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Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson?

Editing

I finished editing my father’s manuscript in the months after his death in 2016 so the long-delayed book about his friend HST, a memoir of their shared love of design, journalism, and pranks, plus a curated collection of tributes by friends, could be published by Ron Turner’s Last Gasp Publishing. Essential reading for any HST fan.

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Writing & Events

Small Business

The FruitGuys

I was pregnant with our first child in 1998 when my husband Chris Mittelstaedt made our first delivery of fruit to offices in San Francisco’s Embarcadero Center, starting The FruitGuys and pioneering the fruit-at-work space. I am partner and former chief story teller & publisher. A certified B Corp since 2019, we donate a minimum 20% of annual profits to hunger relief and small farm sustainability.

The FruitGuys Community Fund is a nonprofit that provides annual grants to small farms for sustainability projects. Since 2012, we have awarded 123 grants totaling nearly half a million dollars to small farms across the country. I am a founding board member.


Swimming

I was almost drowned by a sleeper wave on the Sonoma coast when I was five years old and wouldn’t go near the water for a year. The ocean has captivated me ever since with the fear and desire to be on it, in it, and with it. I began swimming regularly in San Francisco Bay in my twenties, joining the Dolphin Swimming and Boating Club. I suffered panic attacks in the water off and on for many years, but I kept swimming. Twenty years later, I completed my first open water swim in greater San Francisco Bay. Since then I have swum Alcatraz, the Golden Gate, Bay Bridge-Aquatic Park, Golden Gate-Aquatic Park, Bay Bridge-Ballpark, and, in 2023, the 8 miles from Angel Island to San Quentin Prison, which I nicknamed the “Heaven to Hell” swim. I was one of six women swimmers of the She Creatures Catalina Channel Relay team, which successfully swam the Catalina Channel in August 2024.

Pia swimming under the Gold Gate Bridge


Bio

Pia has 30+ years experience in the newspaper, magazine, and publishing business, including leadership positions at the Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and Argonaut Press. She has written for, and edited for, publications including Alta Journal, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, Columbia Journalism Review, Newsweek, Salon, the Associated Press, the San Francisco Business Times, CBS MarketWatch, the Dolphin Log, and The FruitGuys Magazine. She is the co-author of “The Court That Tamed the West,” (2013, Heyday Books) a history of the federal district court for Northern California and was Consulting Editor for “Who Killed Hunter S. Thompson? An Inquiry into the Life and Death of the Master of Gonzo” by her late father Warren Hinckle (2017, Last Gasp). She has a BA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied marine science, Italian, and economics, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia Journalism School, where she was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism. She lived in Rome for five years and is fluent in Italian. A fourth-generation San Franciscan, she lives with her husband and business partner, entrepreneur Chris Mittelstaedt, within earshot of foghorns, her favorite sound from childhood. She swims in San Francisco Bay year round with no wetsuit.