Rick Krizman
author, musician, composer
Now Available
Vlado Novosel, free spirit and big-hearted screwup, charms the ladies of Croatian Strawberry Hill until a surprise pregnancy yokes him into matrimony. To support his burgeoning family in Depression-era Kansas City, Vlado quits his meat packing job and opens a butcher shop with his cousin, Joe. Their efforts to share his stinky kobasa with the world continually place the hapless Vlado at odds with himself, the Catholic Church, and the women in his life. Inevitably, the cousins run afoul of the Pendergast mob, while doubts resurface about the paternity of Vlado’s beloved daughter. All along, we’re pulling for Vlado, a sausage-wielding Don Quixote, aided and abetted in his quest by a colorful cast of enablers and disablers in the Strawberry Hill community, all determined to eat, drink, and bluff their way to a better life.
Rick Krizman was born in Kansas City, Kansas, but eventually found his way to Southern California, where he nurtured a decades-long career as a songwriter and Emmy Award-winning composer for film and television. He now holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University and has published dozens of stories and essays in journals such as sneaker wave magazine, The Wising Up Press, Sediment, Flash Fiction Magazine, Star 82 Review, Medusa’s Laugh Press, Driftwood, Switchback, The Big Smoke America, and so forth. Rick is the father of two grown daughters and lives with his wife and other animals in Santa Monica, CA, where he enjoys jamming on his Moog synthesizer and slow-smoking the toughest parts of the pig. Big Sausage is his first novel.
Music
Once upon a time in a faraway galaxy I wrote theme music for TV shows. Here are some of my favorites.
Publications
"Open House." Drunk Monkeys, January, 2023 (Read)
"Red Geraniums." Hypertext Magazine, 2022 (Read)
"Heartburst." Montana Mouthful, Vol. 4, Issue 2, 2021 (Read)
"Knock-Knock: a fibonacci sonnet" The Fib Review, #45 (Read)
"Beast of a Thousand Burdens." From the Depths, 2020 (Read)
"Heart-wrenching." New Flash Fiction Review, Issue 21, 2019 (Read)
"Interception." Writer's Atelier, January, 2020 (Buy)
"Blue Tip." The Molotov Cocktail, Vol. 10, Issue 10, 2019 (Read)
"little gods." Phantom Drift #8, January, 2019 (Buy)
"The Second Coming." Belletrist Magazine, June, 2019 (Read)
"Spring Melons." West Texas Literary Review, June, 2018 (Read)
"It Was You." The New Engagement, Vol.1, No. 2 (Buy)
"Omaha." Dogwood Literary Journal, 2018 (Buy)
"A Field Guide to Billionaires." 45th Parallel (Read)
"Asteroid." Switchback, Summer issue, 2017 (Read)
"An Early Threat of Winter." Driftwood, Vol 4, Issue 4, 2017 (Read)
"Cantaloupe Island." The Kindness of Strangers Anthology, The Wising Up Press, 2016 (Buy)
"Merciful Heavens." Sediments Literary-Arts Journal, 2016 (Read)
"The Nursery of Story Ideas." Flash Fiction Magazine, 04/2016 (Read)
"A Lighter Shade of Pale Fire." Medusa's Laugh Press, 2017
"An Alternative History of the Future." The Big Smoke, 2017 (Read)
--"I Dream of Donald." (Read)
--"First Day of School." (Read)
"Broken." Star 82 Review, issue 2.3, Fall, 2014 (Read)
"Let it Be." (poem) Alexandria Quarterly, 2017 (Read)
