August 24, 2017

A Trailer in Mind

I took this photograph of a trailer several years ago. The trailer, pretty much abandoned to the naked eye, rests very near the ocean. I once looked through a window and it appeared as if no one had been inside for years, perhaps decades.

The trailer is located on a huge secret lot, surrounded by shore pines, on a secret part of the secret South Coast of Oregon. The beach near the trailer is perhaps the most interesting beach I have ever visited. I’ve seen everything from a man panning for gold to a pagan wedding and heard strange music from a hidden loudspeaker broadcast by an alleged cult leader living in a nearby clifftop mansion preposterously made of stucco and tile in a place where it rains 80 inches a year.

To me, the trailer seems full of secrets and awakens interesting secrets within my mind.

Rain is eroding the trailer. How much longer can the trailer stay intact?

I want to live in this trailer, with someone, and a dog. I want to write and grow a garden and have bonfires. I want to host hikers and bicyclists and driftwood fort nuts and regale them with Oregon Coast tales of free beaches and encounters with wise coyotes and distressed human beings. I want to meet the cult leader.

Who owns the trailer? (Rumor says he’s from Eugene.) I want pitch an idea to the owner, a great notion, and see what happens. Probably nothing. Perhaps everything. You’ve got to pitch great notions in life, or at least I do, to survive. Sometimes when these great notions are received, the people who did the wild receiving smile a unique smile.

Look at this place! Look at the view! Look at this trailer and hum “King of the Road” by Roger Miller.

We must repurpose things in this life: dilapidated people, stray dogs and yes, abandoned trailers, too.

(If you found this post enjoyable, thought provoking or enlightening, please consider supporting a writer at work by making a financial contribution to this blog or by purchasing an NSP book.)

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The Old Crow

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In December of 2020, author Matt Love moved to Portland to care for his elderly father.

Returning to the Rose City jolted Love after 23 years residing on the Oregon Coast. In the Sellwood neighborhood where he lived, Love met a homeless man named Mark. They formed a friendship over literature and the unforeseen magical discoveries in street libraries. They created The Old Crow Book Club, and yes, sometimes that involved drinking Old Crow on a sidewalk.

The club also included several other Sellwood homeless men and women cut from John Steinbeck's Cannery Row cloth.

In due course, Love learned the members' stories of homelessness and how they survived. He wondered what happened to his beloved state of Oregon and attempted to help Mark get off the streets only to run up against the seemingly futile policies to address the crisis.

Along the way, he had the best conversations about books in his life and wrote The Old Crow Book Club, where he recounts his interactions with the homeless people in his neighborhood and offers some suggestions how to alleviate what he considers the greatest man-made American humanitarian disaster of his adult life.

The Old Crow Book Club is available for purchase here and select independent bookstores in Oregon.

Choice Cuts

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Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction by Matt Love contains 20 stories, all set in Oregon. The cast of characters includes a depressed Santa Claus, Steve Prefontaine, Jack Ramsay's fast break offense, socialist squirrels, a clearcut, a dead deer, a junior high football team, a high school tennis player, a dissipated teacher, a man who evolves into a beaver, a homeless vet, a jilted preacher, a double date to a prom, rural degenerates, a wily caterer, and much more.

The publication of the collection culminates a quarter century of the author's writing about Oregon and rambling around the state.

Choice Cuts is available for purchase here, through Amazon, or select independent bookstores in Oregon.

The Savage

of State Street

Nestucca Spit Press is proud to present The Savage of State Street: The Thieving and Literary Lives of Smoky Epley. He is the greatest unheralded writer in Oregon history and also one of its more mediocre, colorful and persistent thieves.

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In 1973, Oregon State University Press published Men in Exile: An Anthology of Creative Writing by Inmates of the Oregon State Penitentiary. Twenty-two of Smoky Epley's pieces appeared in the book.

Smoky spent most of his adult life in state and federal prisons for robbery. In 2008, during one of his brief stints of freedom, Smoky became friends with Matt Love, an Oregon author and publisher. They met after Love discovered Men in Exile and wrote a newspaper column about the landmark book. Smoky read the column and reached out.

He returned to prison in 2009 after forging a check. Upon his release in 2011, Love encouraged Smoky to write a memoir. He completed half of Auto before dying in February of 2013.