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August 18, 2018

Youngs Bay Coffee Shop on a Summer Morning

An overcast morning. Youngs Bay appears flat in the distance. I am drinking fine coffee from a fancy mug. I wonder if I write better under the influence of fine coffee instead of Yuban. I need to conduct a study.

A gull flies overhead. I hear traffic coming into town. The weekend has begun. There is no such thing as a weekend for me anymore.

The smell of the impending school year hangs in the air. I used to both relish and dread that smell. It’s no longer part of my life, but still, occasionally, I waft back into the classrooms and recall some of the memorable moments and memorable personalities. There were many.

Lots of chores today. One of them is moving the stock of my Nestucca Spit Press books to a new location. How many tons of these books have I moved over the years? It’s got to be an Oregon record of some kind.

I read the front page story of the NY Times and it was about a rich tech entrepreneur who apparently has gone insane. I think many people into tech or working in tech have gone insane or gravitated to sociopath status. I wonder how historians will compare the tech giants of today with the Robber Barons from yesteryear. To me, the current crop is ten times richer, more powerful, more insidious, infinitely cooler, and in league with The State to monitor and monetize everything about us. They also don’t build libraries in rural cities across the country. One wonders if there will ever be a huge cultural backlash against their power and ideology. It probably is too late to resist because how can you exist in the modern world without using even the most basic form of tech? We are intertwined and enslaved. I have to use the tech giants to post this blog and conduct communication with a potential employer. There just seems no getting around it unless you live off the grid, and I can’t, although I want to.

Maybe there is something to this writing on fine coffee!

Sun is threatening. I actually would prefer a good, tourist-disillusioning summer rain. It’s the only weapon left for the Oregon Coast.

After the chores, the beach beckons. Then a lengthy ass-to-chair session on a new editorial endeavor. Or I will bag the new editorial endeavor and begin a new literary endeavor. There is a difference.

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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.