In 1974, she established the small printing house Prescott Street Press in Portland to promote unknown authors and produce well-designed affordable books.
Gale was born Viola Håkansson in 1917,[1] in a rural village called Noret along Central Sweden's Västerdal River in Dalarna County.
[5] They came to the country via Ellis Island, and settled in the Swedish community of Clatskanie, Oregon,[2][5] where her father worked as a wood logger for Simon Benson.
[1][3][4] Following the end of World War II, she found employment authoring product promotions and started writing poems and short stories in the 1950s.
[1] In 1974, Gale established the small publishing house Prescott Street Press,[2][3] to promote unknown authors and produce affordable books that were well-designed.
Her work was featured in the books Oregon Signatures in 1959, Golden Year: The Poetry Society of American Anthology in 1960, and NW Manuscript Poems in 1966.
Through Gale's career, she wrote in a more experimental and relaxed away from "the slightly formal feel of the strict stanzaic patterns in her early work".