November 7, 2017

Writing Along with Monk and Rollins

Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins duet on “I Want to be Happy.”

So do I. Some people don’t.

Rain falls and then it doesn’t and I write in concert with jazz.

I just chopped garlic and onions for a mushroom and tomato and rice stew. Jim Harrison would approve. I need a dog here to lick the bowl.

I saw tri-colored yoga pants in the most unlikeliest of places.

A harbor seal followed me for two miles. I called out to him.

I had my hands on lavender cords and they fit, but…they were women’s pants and I couldn’t do it. I’m not there yet.

A former student called me out of the rain and it was good to hear his voice.

I found a book in a laundromat called Crazy Salad, a collection of essays about women, written by Nora Ephron. I started reading it right there. It was published in 1973 and contains more insight into women than any other book I have ever read about women.

A new river is about to emerge in my life.

I saw a man splayed on a gravel bar, flapping his arms like wings.

I met an elderly man who was pulled over for driving eight miles an hour down Highway 101. He told me he was zonked on a prescription opiod and the police arrested him.

I attended a craft fair in an unheated lodge decorated with mounted heads of deer and elk.

My Friday night entertainment this Friday night will be listening to a 2-A high school football playoff game on the radio. In mono. I’ll be tabulating all the cliches from the lone announcer. Heavy rain is forecast. Let it rain on a football field when football players are playing. Let fumbles and dropped passes commence.

(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.