Diane served as proofreader, staff writer, and historian for a Florida publishing firm for more than a dozen years. The company published Florida Living Magazine, Florida Naturalist, and The Real Florida, among many other periodicals.

      From 2000 to 2009, Diane worked in the University of Florida’s Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP). As an editor, she summarized most of the program’s transcribed oral history collections, including its vast archive of World War II oral histories. In 2008, Diane and a SPOHP colleague, Deborah Hendrix, took four of these WW II interviews and created a one-hour documentary based on these oral histories.

      The documentary is titled I Just Wanted to Live! The film—very graphic in content and images—focuses on the similar horrific experiences of four prisoners of war held by the Japanese. The documentary premiered on November 8, 2008, at the University of Florida and is now used as an educational resource in several museums:  The National World War II Museum in New Orleans; the National Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg, Texas; the National POW Museum in Andersonville, Georgia; and the Library of Congress Veterans History Project in Washington, D.C.