sartreblog

July 30, 2018

Additional Notes for the Coffee Shop Novel

Frenzy grips a corporate coffee stronghold in a suburban mall. The baristas wear a device about their chests that acts as a timer. I’ve never seen such a device before. Is it measuring employee performance or various brewing temperatures? Maybe both at the same time for top notch efficiency,

Corporate coffee is hiring.

An elderly man watches videos on his Facebook feed.

Gleaming vehicles roll through the drive-thru.

An elderly man walks in wearing a military grade utility belt. I dig it. His cap proclaims him a Vietnam vet.

I think about my coffee novel and see that it is essentially plotless, which exactly mirrors my life at the moment. It is a strange thing for a person not to have a plot in one’s life after having one forever. Maybe the plotlessness is the plot. The French existential writers milked that technique for decades and it worked out pretty well for them. Perhaps there is more power in observation than plot. Perhaps plot begins to emerge in the mind of readers when they read observations. They invent the plot as the observations accrue.

There is a spill behind the counter and a barista mops it up with excellent technique, most likely derived from a stint in the Navy.

A weathered man on a bicycle pulling a cart filled with returnable cans and bottles pedals through drive-thru.

A cop walks inside, fiddling on her phone. It occurs to me that cops don’t carry nightsticks anymore. Is that because of tasers? The nightstick was once such a symbol of wanton police brutality. I think they were also called truncheons.

Short story idea: the last truncheon-carrying cop in America…a real throwback who has never fired his weapon in the line of duty. He’s a laughingstock on the force and…I must ponder this idea some more.

A line is forming at the register. It’s going to be a profitable day.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

$11.99 + $3 Shipping

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

of Oregon Fiction

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

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.

$19.99 + $3 Shipping

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.