photo by KM, January 2020


Peter Ford

Cuke Managing Director

Peter has been putting major time into Cuke Archives since 2010. He's involved with me daily with all aspects of it, but his forte is the mechanics of it all which is way beyond my ken. The database of shunryusuzuki.com, the dropdown menus on cuke.com, the form and function of the offline archive are but some highlights of his contributions. Peter has an acute eye for detail and a steady grasp of the complex entirety of Cuke Archives. We both get ideas of what should be done, but he's the one who makes it work. Frequently we're in touch multiple times in a day. Often I'm like an assistant to him, providing material, expressing gratitude. He lives in Pennsylvania. - DC
Peter's Cuke page

Michael Katz

Co-conspirator, advisor, supporter

Michael came to the SFZC in the early seventies to do the first archiving of Shunryu Suzuki lecture tapes. In the eighties he became the SFZC's literary agent. I wrote my first book, Thank You and OK, at his urging. He's functioned since then as an agent, editor, advisor, and substantial supporter of all in the Cuke realm and beyond. - DC

Michael's Cuke page

John Tarrant is the founding teacher of the Pacific Zen Institute (PZI), Cuke Archives principal fiscal sponsor. He's a long time major supporter and confidant.

Clare Hollander is a long-time Zen practitioner who checks our USPO box weekly and deals with other communications and tasks including shopping, scanning, banking, mailing. She's head of the Cuke California office which has no particular physical location, but it has her.

Lawrence Burns is the co-founder, and until 2022 was the treasurer for Cuke Press and, as Cuke Press Postmaster, has taken care of Cuke Press mailing. He was intimately involved in the editing and design of A Brief History of Tassajara, and a good deal more.

Bill Redican was a good friend of Cuke Archives when we were getting going in the mid 1990s. He was in charge of the Shunryu Suzuki lecture archiving project for the SFZC a couple of decades ago that got the audio and transcripts in much better and more complete order and produced the verbatim transcripts from the audio tapes. As our chief copyeditor, he carefully reviewied the audio and updated text files of Crooked Cucumber for an audiobook, 2nd edition. He helped  in this way with Crooked Cucumber before it was first published.

Bill's cuke page

Gus Awan has just started working with DC in Bali on a variety of tasks. He was a recent guest on DC's Life in Bali weekly podcast. He writes:

I was born and raised in a loving family in Bangli, Bali. Now I work as a front office staff At Floating Leaf eco Luxury Retreat. I'm so blessed (prefer this word rather than lucky) because I believe things happened for a reason. Here I have met and become friends with a lot of people from around the world and here I can fulfill lot that I have dreamed of, and for sure I can improve my English. For almost ten years I worked in online customer service for a short term apartment rental company in Paris, a family business owned by A Balinese Man married  to a French Woman. 

Fred Harriman - expert translations of DC interviews in Japan, his own interviews there, and his encyclopedic knowledge of Japanese history and culture were an immense help in the creation of Crooked Cucumber. He and his wife Takayo provide Japanese language, history, culture translations and information.
 







Susannah Duerr is now (July 2021) a graduate student at Duke who is scheduled to conduct more studies at Komazawa, the Soto Zen university, in Tokyo, in the fall.  Her fluent knowledge of Japanese and Japanese Soto Zen are most helpful She lent us her ears with the audiobook for Crooked Cucumber and is keeping up with efforts to restart the recently bankrupt Samgha which published Japanese translations of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Not Always So, Zen Is Right Here, and Crooked Cucumber.

Katrinka McKay, DC wife - consultation on everything.
photo by KM, 2021

The IHS is a community of scholars located in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has been Cuke Archives' secular fiscal sponsor since around the turn of the century, since 2011 fiscal sponsor when non religious sponsor needed. DC has been a proud member that long too.

Everyone Else

Aside from those of us mentioned above, Cuke Archives is the result of the contributions of a legion of others who work on various projects or tasks, make contributions of material, offer suggestions, note mistakes, and offer financial support. A few people in particular come to mind. We're most grateful to Lew Richmond, Michael Wenger, and Steve Stucky. Click on their names and the role of each will be described on their cuke pages. Countless others. A great deal of the material herein of course wasn't created by or for Cuke. What we do is to gather as much of it as we can from here and there, add it to what we have come up with, and make it all available. It would be impossible to make a complete list of contributors, but there are many named on the page for the History of Shunryu Suzuki Archiving. Then there are the lists of people on the Contributors Page. And one could look at the list of over 500 of us on the People Index. And all of those named and unnamed in the 2020 Cuke Archives presentation. - DC