Penny Simonson: Darin Z. Krogh was the writer of our lives

If you are a reader in Spokane, there is a chance you’ve read his work in various newspapers, including quite regularly here in The Spokesman-Review; in locally and regionally produced magazines and in a fair number of anthologies. Last fall, his book “Lilac City Confidential” was released.

Maybe you will recognize his distinctive byline: Darin Z. Krogh. Perhaps a short while ago, you read his obituary, another fine and humorous example of his work.

Krogh’s community-focused essays and narratives always demonstrated his love of, and amusement toward, Spokane, children and family, marriage, aging – and always, Hillyard. There is no more faithful alumnus in Spokane, than one who has graduated from John R. Rogers High School, and the tales told by the Class of 1966 framed their time together in that fierce part of town as the contributing factor in their behavior. And while those stories, told over and over again, kept those antics alive for them, it was with ever-changing and always exaggerated details, Krogh pushed them along in his writing.

Within his fiction – which usually carried a heavy dose of noir – it could sometimes be jarring when suddenly a new character would appear bearing your very name, or that of your spouse or an acquaintance. And in some cases, cast as the villain of the story. But the laugh, and perhaps outrage, he knew it would elicit far outweighed whether he was producing good literature or not. Krogh’s writing was his joy, and it brought just that to his reader.

His deep love of Spokane history, especially characters with interesting backgrounds or even better, questionable behavior, was showcased by his vast index of what or whom he would write about next. “Always involved in research,” he would say, especially if his office for the day was his favorite watering hole. But it was a nod to that keen ability of gathering and storing information, that he recently had been hired and was working diligently on a biography of a well-known local developer.

Being a writer, he knew, takes courage. You have to be willing to let your words be flung into the universe with the understanding that you will not be able to get them back. But you also have to be generous enough to share something that you suspect the reader will appreciate while allowing yourself the vulnerability to accept that doesn’t always happen.

When Krogh was diagnosed with a fatal strain of leukemia and had less than 30 days before facing his exit from this life, he brought that same courage, generosity and vulnerability to the battle. He gifted us with his humor and insight and love and kindness as he understood that we all had to face his untimely death as well.

On the very day that he died, the newest issue of Nostalgia Magazine was released – with a photo of glamour girl Dolores Del Monte gracing the cover – a young girl from Spokane, a Rogers grad, who had unsuspectingly become a Playboy centerfold in the 1950s, but later lived a normal life of wife and mother.

A story by Darin Z. Krogh.

Penny Simonson is a Spokane writer whose work Darin Z. Krogh took great delight in editing.