now available

Zelda’s Bed by Klecko

Zelda’s Bed spans 72 hours in Montgomery, Alabama. Making a pilgrimage plagued by travel delays and extreme heat, Klecko spends an August weekend at the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum to launch The Dead Fitzgeralds, the first book in his Fitzgerald trilogy.

Located in Montgomery’s Cloverdale neighborhood, the museum is in a home where the couple lived briefly in 1931; it now shares space with an Airbnb.

For Klecko, a stranger in a strange land, being in the South is surreal and intriguing.
A place where he thrives as he delivers his message about the Fitzgeralds. Once that mission is complete, he wanders to Hilltop where he does tarot readings for a line of people stretched out the door of a Montgomery nightclub into the summer heat.

From there, he bides his time well into the night, a bottle of Crown Royal at his side, under a sprawling magnolia tree in the Fitzgeralds’ front yard. The mystery of Zelda Fitzgerald is revealed during a night he spends in her bedroom. And he discovers the sad charm of Zelda’s love for her Montgomery hometown, and her dreams for the future as he trudges, parched and hungover, through Oakwood Cemetery on a Sunday morning.

In 72 hours, Klecko experiences the moments of a lifetime and the kindness of strangers in a place called Montgomery, Alabama

now available

Medicine Year by Thomas R. Smith

Medicine Year is a record in poems of 2020, a year in which, for the poet and his wife, personal crises coincided with the coronavirus pandemic in a medical “perfect storm.”  But Medicine Year is fundamentally not about illness or pandemic but about health and being alive in times that deplete our physical and emotional resources.  There are many kinds of poems here from love poems to topical poems to spiritual poems to poems of natural observation, these last a perennial, sustainable source of nourishment.    

Smith writes, "These poems are healing songs I wrote during that year foremost to keep myself afloat emotionally.  For someone, somewhere, every year is a 'medicine' year, in need of whatever healing resources present themselves.  I hope readers will find these 'songs' helpful in our current strange moment."

Available at local book sellers.

about the author

Thomas R. Smith is an internationally published poet, essayist, editor, and teacher. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies in the U.S., Canada, and abroad. Garrison Keillor has featured his poetry on Writer’s Almanac and former US Poet Laureate Ted Kooser has selected his poems for his syndicated column, American Life in Poetry.

He teaches poetry at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and posts poems and essays on his web site at www.thomasrsmithpoet.com.  

Newest release

The Dead Fitzgeralds

“This madcap, full-speed-ahead book isn’t just about Fitzgerald. It’s about the crazy passion that is literature. It’s about being buzzed by reading and writing, and it’s about the sacred friendships of the word-besotted lovers of poems and stories, of gossip, and the music underlying how we speak to each other.”
— Patricia Hampl

About the author

Winner of a 2020 Midwest Book Award, Klecko is a master bread baker. He’s spent close to four decades designing product lines across the Twin Cities. Currently he and the Russian Supermodel live in a mansion catty-corner from the home where F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his first novel. He enjoys Nordic authors, Rolling Stones albums and Dora Maar paintings.

Hitman-Baker-Casketmaker

Hitman-Baker-Casketmaker: Aftermath of an American’s Clash with ICE spotlights loss, change and resurrection. For the first time, Master Bread Baker Klecko reveals the circumstances behind the 2018 demise of St. Agnes Baking Company, just days before the Twin Cities hosted Super Bowl LII at U.S. Bank Stadium. The 30-year old bakery was scheduled to be a primary vendor for the event.