July 17, 2017

Bonnie and Clyde Files 11

I winded down the Lewis and Clark River Road enroute to the dog sanctuary and another gimpy romp with Bonnie and Clyde. On the radio, a sports talk moron said that Miami has the best beaches in the country. They’ve got steak houses and discos right at the ocean’s edge!

My car was loaded with five boxes of items for the upcoming August rummage sale to benefit the Angels for Sara Sanctuary. I had gathered the donations from various friends and family members and planned to round up another five boxes. All I want to do is serve—what I’ve done my whole professional life. Now, dogs only. That might be forever.

I pulled into the gravel parking lot and saw Bonnie and Clyde at the gate, howling and dancing around.

We hit the pasture and the two old bank robbers didn’t have their usual gumption. I slowed us down, enticed them with treats, and we finally made it to the river. They went into the water. I sat down on the bank and started composing a haiku about old dogs in a river, counting syllables on my fingers. I waited and the current didn’t seem to go anywhere. The slack of summer low flow. I feel it inside me. I want more flow, into a new watershed of life.

The haiku wasn’t materializing so I stopped trying.

Bonnie and Clyde came over and collapsed in the grass on either side of me. I stroked their heads and we stared at the river together. We were 17 syllables strong.

(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

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

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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.