August 4, 2017

Bonnie and Clyde Files 14

Just me and Clyde one weekday morning. Bonnie was laid low by an adverse reaction to a medication, but she’ll be back in action soon. I brought along breakfast and guarded it zealously from Clyde’s fiendish status as an aggressive procurer of treats.

Barn swallows dipped and dived above the surface of the river. It ran barely a foot above bottom and the shallow channel invited me to wade across. Thus, I took off my running shoes, used Nikes, black socks, rolled up my pants, and walked barefoot into the water. I hadn’t walked into a river in over 15 years. Absurd.

Two steps in and…forget it! Stones made the footing painful and treacherous. I nearly tripped and fell over, but regained my balance and retreated to the bank.

Dammit, I needed real river shoes, not ones made from oil by child slaves that would never dry out if immersed. I needed my trusty Converse Chuck Taylor high tops, canvas, faded blue, sprinkled with paint, a quarter century old, and veterans of multiple watershed recreation campaigns. I almost got rid of them during my recent terrible hospice care of myself, but somehow they survived the purge.

The Chucks were coming to the river with me. I would ford the Lewis and Clark in them, in corduroy cutoffs and a Rainier stuffed into my back pocket. No doubt Bonnie and Clyde would follow me across. Well, I knew Clyde would, because I planned on bringing beef jerky with me next time, wiggling it at him, and the old German shepherd mix with the gimp would undoubtedly lose his mind and follow me to the ends of the Earth. Dogs are like that. That is their only wonderful agenda.

(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.