November 23, 2017

Thanksgiving List

I am thankful for my family, my two sets of parents and my sister and brother in law, who have helped me weather a raging storm that obliterated me and renders me talking about my former self in the third person.

I am thankful for dogs, old dogs, puppies, discarded dogs, dogs in liquor stores, dogs on the beach and dogs in my dreams, and the people who care about dogs and work for them.

I am thankful for my ex-wife Cindy, who has never given up on me.

I am thankful for Earl and Carolyn in Gold Beach.

I am thankful for the Oregon Coast bookstores who still order my books.

I am thankful for Bonnie and Clyde.

I am thankful for Jacque at the Angels for Sara Sanctuary for allowing me to volunteer.

I am thankful for the holiday craft fair giggers.

I am thankful for birds and ferns and seals and elk.

I am thankful for Oregon’s legacy of publicly-owned beaches.

I am thankful for Caroline and Tom O. They both kept me in the Oregon creative game.

I am thankful for my three special human friends and two canine ones in Astoria that have kept me afloat.

I am thankful for authors of books. I am thankful for those who threw out old books where I found them in the strangest of places. Nothing like changing your life for free or 50 cents.

I am thankful for the ten kind inmates of the Chill Tank who served time with me in the Clatsop County Jail in January of 2017. In the future, I hope to do good work in your name. That was some writing workshop we had together. I’ll publish it some day, somehow. Nobody hears you. I heard you.

I am thankful for the people who keep signing up for the writer’s workshops. These workshops had a large part in saving my creative life.

I am thankful for anyone who withholds judgment. I am thankful for your patience. It is a dying art in our culture.

I am thankful for anyone from my past who wants to reconnect but seems at lost how to do so. Just write. Just broach. I would love a broaching. I promise not to refer myself in the third person if you do.

(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

$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.