November 2, 2017

Light Bulbs

The fog drifted here and there. I moved through it without any real purpose. Why have a defined purpose on the beach at dawn? Why not wander? Why not wander into a metaphor?

I followed the curving wrack line. It was stacked with kelp, crabs, seaweed, wood, shells and feathers. I culled the detritus with a stick looking for treasures to decorate my home.

There it was, a light bulb, an old school incandescent model, 60 watts. It wasn’t burned out.

Then another light bulb, an old school florescent tube, definitely burned out.

Previous to this discovery, I had never come across light bulbs in 20 years of rambling Oregon’s ocean beaches. But here they were.

I beach comb primarily for metaphors these days but never go out expressly looking for them. It’s not like I say: this morning I will find a metaphor to help guide my life. The metaphors just materialize and I always stand ready to contemplate their existence, juggle them in the air, and perhaps apply them to my life.

Two light bulbs! How could I ignore that find? Maybe it wasn’t even a coincidence but the ocean rolling in some trash that I could repurpose for abstract inspiration.

A light bulb went on in my mind (an energy efficient one, I might add). At long last, I had the one big idea I needed to transcend my present ordeal.

The idea was that I needed to invent one colossal creative idea to explode me out of marginalization. I feel like I’ve been crawling of late to escape. Forget crawling. Climb inside the barrel of a battleship’s big gun and fire away!

I diagrammed the colossal idea right there in the sand, committed it to memory, and then continued my wandering.

(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.