December 5, 2017

Letter to a Driftwood Fort Apprentice

Dear____

Thank you for your warm and generous correspondence regrading my passion for building driftwood forts. It was most unexpected considering our mutual love of Rilke brought us together. Rilke clearly never built a driftwood fort. He seemed much more of a hang-out-in-the-garden type of man (although he did favor corduroy jackets).

You ask: why do you build? I respond; why not? Why not eradicate thoughts vandalizing your mind and make art and shelter at the ocean’s edge. It’s free. It’s a great workout as well.

No, the fort will not last forever. Forever is overrated. Starting over is underrated. Every time you build a fort you start over. Life is like that for those people who swim against the current and dodge jet boats ridden by lemmings. I suspect you are one of those swimmers. In fact, I am counting on it.

You ask if I consider myself an artist when I build forts. Yes I am! I never considered myself a visual artist of any kind until my fort-building passion took off several years ago for reasons I still can’t quite comprehend and thus have given up trying.

Now, 700 forts later, I am a master but this is of little consequence because no one who visits my gallery and encounters my creations knows the name of the artist. All creations are entirely anonymous and no two are ever the same. They can’t be. They never last and I find their evanescence beautiful.

I urge you to travel away from your buzzing megalopolis, to the Pacific Ocean, to the beaches on the Oregon Coast, the undisputed unofficial capital of driftwood fort building. We have our own flag and fort scout dogs. No government. We generally wear the attire of recycled clothes from dead people.

On these beaches, you will find the materials to inaugurate your fort-building life. It is quite possible that once you build a fort, you will become obsessed with the practice and unlock all sorts of metaphors that will convey you to new territories of creativity, spirituality and sensuality.

Again, thanks for writing.

Your faithful friend

(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.

$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.