February 26, 2021

Some Memories of Lincoln City

I was passing through Lincoln City the other rainy day and my mind flooded with all the great experiences I enjoyed in that town, particularly the ones associated with my brief teaching career at Taft High School from 2004-06. In retrospect, it was a teaching gig I should have never left, and I will never forget that impromptu sendoff from the students and the singing of the Titanic theme song in the hallway on my last day. I guess I also won’t forget that moment when a student hurled a book at me when I announced I was resigning. (It missed.)

In my early days as a writer living on the Oregon Coast, I disparaged the town and took my cue from former Oregon Governor Mark Hatfield who dubbed the Lincoln City area in the 1960s as the “twenty miserable miles” because of the terrible and tawdry development along 101.

Yes, there was and is some truth to that statement, but after I started teaching there in 2004, I learned through my own eyes and my students’ writing that there was so much more to the place and that school. I’ve written on these subjects over the years in various publications, but I truly felt a sense of historical vertigo when I rolled past some of my teaching spots, Drift Creek Falls Bridge, Roberts Books, Connie Hansen Garden, Mo’s Beach, Sitka Center, the history museum, Dairy Queen, and the Dorchester House senior living facility where the freshmen English class staged a ten-minute, lunch-time Romeo and Juliet to a wildly appreciative audience. There was also an incredible literary review that nearly got burned up in a censorship dispute and the legendary 2006 poetry slam that I still have on VHS and plan to transfer to YouTube soon. What talent at that show! We also started a newspaper at Taft, The 45^th Parallel, that had some truly astonishing writing and creative minds.

I met some of the most special and important people of my life in Lincoln City. They will always be with me. And well, nearby Hart’s Cove on Cascade Head is where I have always known I will end my sentient life.

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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

$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.