fort5

September 8, 2020

Country Music Morning Fog

I walked north along the beach in a thick morning fog. I expected to come to a creek that flowed into the ocean and thus, would have to turn around.

But the creek wasn’t there. A wall of sand blocked the entrance to the sea and the creek’s low summer flow couldn’t break through.

So I kept walking into a new beach I’d never walked before.

Oh the magic of a new Oregon beach! I live for this sort of thing and whenever I think I’ve hit them all, I find a new undiscovered stretch and fall in love with Oregon’s socialist beaches all over again. When some day I’ve fallen off the cliffs at Hart’s Cove, I want to know that I am the greatest beach walker in Oregon history. Hubris? Why the hell not? Certainly I’ve written more words about Oregon’s beaches than anyone in Oregon history. Double hubris? Why not?

To my astonishment I found a fort on this beach. I inspected it. A perfect little nap, drop-out-of-America fort. I kept moving. Lots of kelp in piles that suggested an invading army had been wiped out coming ashore.

As I headed back, an idea for a country song popped into mind. What?! I titled it “Cowboy Conservative.”

I was inventing the lyrics right there, and singing them in the fog, probing for a melody.

I’m a cowboy conservative sonofabith / Get my news from Fox News tits

Wish the Confederacy wasn’t one and done / we’d be a righteous country if they had won

This is clearly a hit. I’ve really got to record the country album I’ve had in my head for years. I only need my lead singer to come forward. She knows who she is.

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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.