Poor Manhattan. Yes, it is one of the greatest cities in the world, filled with some of our country’s most impressIve monuments to culture, history, and urban community. But it doesn't have a great tomato—a ripe, juicy, fire-engine red tomato, the ones that put the puny supermarket variety to shame. So every August, the writers and publishers Marge Piercy and her husband, Ira Wood, pick a basket of tomatoes from their Wellfleet garden and send them post haste to their agent, Lois Wallace of the prestigious Wallace Literary Agency in Manhattan.

“We grow such great tomatoes, they're prized in New York City," Wood says proudly. Wallace is one lucky woman—she gets the best of the first crop from Wood and Piercy's lush organic garden that they've been tilling for 30 years.

The couple's home on a saltwater marsh in Wellfleet, with its acres of cultivated vegetables, flowers, and fruit trees, is one part of their richly creative life. The other part is at Leapfrog Press, a corner loft space overlooking Wellfleet Harbor, behind Mac's Shack seafood joint and upstairs from Zack's Yoga and the Harmon Gallery. The Leapfrog office is colorful and clean-lined, with Navajo rugs hanging on the walls and a comfortable leather couch and rocking chair.

Wood and Piercy, both writers, launched Leapfrog Press 10 years ago. It is a small press with excellent marketing and national distribution. They founded Leapfrog because, Wood says, they were seeing too many fine books getting rejected by big publishing houses.

“The shelf life of a hardcover book is the same as a container of low-fat sour cream," he says, and he doesn't seem to be exaggerating much. Many of Leapfrog's publication list of 30 books are regularly reviewed by major magazines and newspapers. Some of the press's books have won great acclaim. One, Confessions of a Memory Eater by Gen-X icon Pagan Kennedy, was glowingly reviewed in the New York Times Book Review and featured in Entertainment Weekly.

A few Leapfrog authors have a Cape Cod connection. Wellfleet Police Chief Richard Rosenthal has penned several books for Simon & Schuster, before turning to Leapfrog for his memoir Rookie Cop: Deep Undercover in the Jewish Defense League, which was optioned by Maury Povich's production company.

"We frequently sell movie options," Wood says.

Another of Leapfrog's best-selling books is So You Want to Write, by Wood and Piercy, an iconic novelist and a major American poet. "It's like we downloaded our brains into that book," Wood says. "It's everything we know about writing and the publishing business."

Leapfrog's marketing, especially the cute, bright-green frog logo, looks home-grown, but is actually very honed.
“This is the reason small presses work," Wood says. "We put a tremendous amount of marketing into our books."

Wood and Piercy have been together for more than 30 years. They met on the porch of Wood’s apartment in Cambridge, outside Harvard Square, when Wood, as he relates, was preparing dinner and "beating egg whites incompetently." Piercy, visiting the house, taught him how to do it properly, and today it's still a great story of the beginning of a long, happy marriage. There is much more to the couple's life than their professional pursuits. Wood is in his third term as town selectman and is very involved in Lower Cape politics.

"It's a very active, lively town," he says. "Everything political in Wellfleet is a very passionate issue."

Spring and early summer is a time for hard work in the garden. New Year's Day is devoted to seed catalogs, and St. Patrick's Day, the peas are planted, "even if we have to shovel snow off the garden," Wood says. “We're like birds," he adds. “We respond to light. We declare winter over in March."

Whether they are working, teaching, growing tomatoes, or having coffee at the Flying Fish in Wellfleet, Wood and Piercy seem to see life as a whole-a full, quite wonderful one, at that.



Their year at home is a string of celebrations. “We're big ritual celebrators," Wood says. “They help us get through the year." Piercy's most recent book, Pesach for the Rest of Us (Shocken/Random House, 2007), is a nonfiction work about Passover in a world where families are often a multi-religious, multi-cultural unit.

In Leapfrog Press, as in the rest of their lives, Wood and Piercy only take on projects they believe in-books that fit their passions and ideals. Books they can celebrate.

"We simply won't publish what we don't love," Wood says. "You have to love it."