\\LINK TO VIDEO OF DIANE’S TALK//
11/8/23: Diane Kruchkow, “How I became a literary rebel: The fascinating development of the small press movement in the 1970s, and my participation in it”
12:30pm, Emery Performance Space
Free and open to the public
In college, Diane Kruchkow became interested in the Expatriate scene in Europe during the 1920s (“The Lost Generation”) and searched for a similar contemporary scene in this country—a place where people were intensely interested in literature and breaking away from its corporate domination. She joined the new national small press organization, COSMEP, headquartered in San Francisco, where she was later elected to the Board of Directors and then named Chair of the organization. She spent many years traveling all over the country meeting with small press editors and literary organizations (including the newly formed National Endowment for the Arts) and working on projects and ideas to help promote the new writing and publishing movements which were decentralizing the control of these areas. She also published a little magazine, Zahir, featuring poetry, prose and essays, and Stony Hills, a small press review which broke ground documenting this new movement. Diane later moved to Maine where she taught at the University of Maine at Farmington for many years. She was on the Board and then president of the Arts Institute of Western Maine (now Arts Farmington) and taught skiing in the Titcomb Mountain Ski School. She is now on the Board of Directors of Titcomb. Diane is the co-editor of Green Isle in the Sea: An Informal History of the Alternative Press,1960-85 (December Press, 1986), which documents the small press movement through first-person narratives of those at its helm.
Comments are closed.