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July 18, 2017

Lines From the Ocean Writing Workshop

Various lines written during the recent ocean writing workshop:

The ocean didn’t do it for me today. The people at the ocean with me today, did. They offered me a portal of possibilities to reinvent myself and reinvigorate my gifts. They were my keyhole limpets and I looked with them, not through. There is a difference.

Limpets induce limpid thinking.

Sixty percent of Americans have never seen the ocean in person. Perhaps that explains a lot about American politics and the election of Trump. Can you reasonably believe he would have won if 100 percent of this nation’s registered voters had seen the ocean in person? This is a topic worth exploring as a writer although I have no idea how to do so.

The ocean is listless today. Torpid. I don’t dare call it mediocre.

Fourteen writers writing on the jetty is a powerful sight. Unprecedented.

I need to initiate a new relationship to the ocean. Do I need a new running mate for this?

I loved the way she bounded on the beach. It was almost a hopping motion. When she discovered sand dollars, she became positively giddy. I miss seeing that.

I still can teach. I still have something to offer. A man gave me a hug after the workshop and thanked me for my effort. I had met him only four hours ago.

Even if you poured an ocean on me, my passion for life and wanting to help people, animals and watersheds would not be extinguished.

My attorney has the talent to write a great detective novel that makes supernatural use of Gordon Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

Watching waves reach the beach from an elevated perpendicular angle is wondrous. There is beauty in the math.

I changed a life for the better three years ago by building a driftwood fort with someone. He said it cracked his veneer. We all need a good veneer cracking. I sure got mine recently. No more veneers for me.

(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.