September 5, 2017

Roofing!

A friend had forwarded me an email advertising a writing gig. The subject line of the email read: Roofing Blogger.

Roofing blogger! Hell yes! I love roofs! I once roofed a house! I once ripped a roof off a house. I fell off a roof in third grade and broke my arm! I once made out on a roof! The love of my previous life once surprised me by waiting on my roof in a bikini! (She was actually cleaning the skylight.) I want to write about roofs! Five posts, 800 words each of original roofing content. Twenty-five hundred bucks. I could crank out five posts in three hours, pay the mortgage and then some.

My mind raced to conjure possible topics: 1) That riveting Oregon Tavern Age conversation about roofing I overheard in the Big O Saloon; 2) The classic early 60s hit “Up on the Roof” by The Drifters; A probing literary essay about all the mentions of roofs in Sometimes a Great Notion; 4) Snoopy’s existential musings on the roof of his dog house; 5) A meditative pastiche of roof-top images from Mary Poppins, Peter Pan and Jason Bourne rooftop-chase scenes; 6) A deconstruction of the rooftop scene from the movie Reality Bites; 7) A proverb from the Old Testament that went something like, “It’s better to live on the roof of a house than inside with a contentious woman.”

I was giddy about the possibility of writing about roofs, perhaps becoming the foremost blogger in America on roofs. I hurried down to the garage, dug out the ladder, brought it outside, climbed on my roof, and beheld the gillnetting grandeur of Youngs Bay. There was another essay right there!

A gull flew by. Then another. They gave me the eye. I came to my senses.

The roofing industry wouldn’t want my swashbuckling takes on their product. They would demand the basics and practicalities. They would want discussions of composites, shingles, cedar shakes, tiles, gutters, sealants and moss eradication.

I couldn’t write that dreck!

I looked at my roof. It was a damn good roof and kept me dry during a record rainfall. Not one tiny leak or speck of mold.

I could write that dreck! And I would sprinkle in Kesey and The Drifters, too, dammit!

(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.