wood

December 30, 2020

Beaverwood for Christmas!

It was Christmas Day and I was on my way to visit my mother and step dad for a drive-by celebration when it struck me that I had some time to kill before my scheduled arrival. I stopped at Clackamette Park in Oregon City to spend a half hour. There, I admired the rushing brown rivers and leafless black cottonwoods. My mind and heart were heavy with the recent loss of my step mom and I speculated on what the future would bring to me and my father. I knew one thing for sure, I’d be spending a lot of time in Portland with my father in the coming days and weeks and I wouldn’t enjoy my daily interaction with the ocean, which is so critical to my spiritual and creative well being.

High water from heavy rain had deposited all manner of driftwood on the banks of the park and being the driftwood aficionado that I am, I had to inspect the various specimens flowing down the Willamette River Watershed.

In recent years, I have amassed perhaps the greatest collection of beaverwood in the world and never fail to hunt for choice cuts whenever I prowl Oregon’s beaches, rivers and streams. There is nothing like finding a great piece! That pretty much passes for my recreational life at the Oregon Coast. I’ll take it. It’s entirely free, too.

As I said, it was Christmas Day and I was meandering through the driftwood when I saw it. A glorious choice cut and all for my taking! I picked it up and beheld the splendor. What a gift from the Oregon gods to alleviate my angst. I kept walking and kept finding more choice cuts……I was like, well, a kid on Christmas morning.

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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.