spiralnotebooks

September 21, 2018

Random Coffee Shop Novel Notes

The barista compliments me on my 99-cent corduroy coat. “Made in Yugoslavia,” I tell her. It’s not clear to she knew what Yugoslavia was or had ever heard the word spoken.

I am in faceless coffee shop in a totalitarian city. Everyone is paying handsomely to be monitored.

The coffee shop novel is starting to cohere into something utterly unpublishable.

A jogger jogs by. Bad form. Hands too high.

The road beckons. Klamath Falls sounds good. I’ve never seen it. What do people do there? Is their joy or seething in the populace?

Reunions are afoot. I relish them.

A reader of the rain book reached out to me and called me a “translator” of rain. I love it when readers reach out. It does take effort. I am fortified when I learn that my writing still connects to people. The stories of how they come to find my books are equally inspiring.

A woman wearing a black tennis skirt walks in and I do a doubletake. She is clearly a player; I can tell by the sturdy quads. She’s not wearing the skirt out of some urban irony.

Someone walks in with a spiral notebook. Then another. And another! It’s a spiral notebook revolution. I am writing this in a spiral notebook. Will they one day go extinct?

The OTA manuscript is completed. Now what? I think this book has unique Oregon value.

I miss my husky. I had another dream about her the other night. I miss our maniacal runs down the beach in rain.

Two men behind me are discussing their tech high jinks.

A recent graduate from college is interviewing for some progressive internet job, assuming there is such a job.

I’m making all this up from the coffee shop. I have a strong proclivity for fiction in these joints.

Support Meditations Blog

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.