Nestucca Spit Press in the News

Nonfiction review: 'Gimme Refuge' by Matt Love

By Jeremy Garber

Special to The Oregonian
May 08, 2010

The enthusiasm that permeates Matt Love's writing is both contagious and inspiring. As an author focused almost exclusively on Oregon and its history, Love's works have established him as one of the region's eminent writers. In "Gimme Refuge: The Education of a Caretaker," his first book since winning the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, Love tells the tale of how a chance opportunity to serve as caretaker of a neglected wildlife refuge on Oregon's north coast radically transformed his life.

After nearly a decade of teaching and fruitless attempts at writing, a disheartened Love left Portland and moved to the Oregon coast where he took a job at a small, private school in Neskowin. Before the start of his second year there, Love accepted an offer to move to and act as caretaker of the nearby 600-acre Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. "Gimme Refuge" is set almost entirely in the year between the summers of 1998 and 1999, Love's first year on the refuge.

Love's memoir chronicles his tireless efforts to battle not only his professional frustrations and doubts but also the Himalayan blackberries that had all but overrun the refuge. Charged with restoring the refuge to greater ecological stability, Love also set about renovating the dilapidated house he was sharing with then-wife Cindy (the book's illustrator) while fulfilling his commitment to finish out the school year. As the narrative shifts between the classroom and the refuge, it becomes evident that the devotion and ingenuity Love employed in his teaching were well-suited to the seemingly endless tasks of manual labor.

"Gimme Refuge" seems to synthesize all that Love holds dear: Oregon, the beach, dogs, the Rolling Stones, teaching, loyalty, hard work, storytelling and the wisdom that comes only from doing what one knows to be right. At turns hilarious, touching, poignant and insightful, Love's candor commands adoration. Like all writers, particularly those gifted with an affinity for nuance (be it in perception of a driving guitar solo or the formation of flocked geese passing overhead), Love effortlessly imbues the commonplace with a touch of due reverence.

The quintessentially Oregonian tale of striving to blaze a trail for one's self is not new, yet it never fails to charm and inspire others wise enough to see themselves as capable of the same. In yielding to chance, Love's discovery of how to enact his own passions created a lasting legacy that goes far beyond his own personal accomplishments as writer and educator. "Gimme Refuge" is more then mere memoir; it's a testament to how one person's actions can permanently enrich the environment of students and ecosystems alike.

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Writer: Oregon will never run out of stories

By Jamie Passaro

For The Register-Guard
Sunday, Apr 11, 2010

Matt Love is one of those rare mythical creatures who publishes his own books and then sells them with the kind of zeal that borders on rock ’n’ roll. Since 2003, his Nestucca Spit Press has published eight books about Oregon and an online drinking guide to the coast at www.letitpour.net.

Two recent books, “Super Sunday in Newport: Notes From My First Year in Town” and “Gimme Refuge: The Education of a Caretaker,” chronicle Love’s move to the coast and his 10-year stint as caretaker at the Nestucca Bay National Wildlife Refuge. His writing style is personal and honest, raw sometimes to the point of being bloggish.

A typical Google search on Love will lead you to Powells.com, where he writes a regular column called “On Oregon,” and to an album by Portland band Richmond Fontaine, whose frontman, Willy Vlautin, is one of Love’s favorite novelists. Love mentions it because listening to the band’s recent album, “We Used to Think the Freeway Sounded Like a River,” pulled Love out of a depression over the loss of his dog, Ray (named after Raymond Carver).

And that’s the way it goes. Love’s projects are all a kind of do-it-yourself love note to Oregon, with wild adoration for the coast.

In 2009, Oregon Literary Arts presented Love with the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, for his contributions to Oregon history and literature. He teaches English and journalism at Newport High School.

Question: Why did you decide to start Nestucca Spit Press?

Answer: I had a very specific audience in mind for my Oregon-centric books and quickly realized that starting my own press was the best (and only) way to reach this audience. I took the name from a stretch of sand on the Oregon Coast that Bob Straub saved from utter desecration by the state when they wanted to relocate Highway 101 there in the 1960s.

Question: Publishing your own work is a bold move. Did you shop around for a publisher first?

Answer: I did with an earlier version of “Gimme Refuge” and the big Oregon anthology. I got close a couple of times and it still could happen down the road, but bigger publishers move at such a glacial pace that it becomes debilitating to me to wait around. I’ve also proved to myself that I don’t really need a publisher to sell books. Nestucca Spit Press has moved nearly 10,000 books in seven years, exclusively through events, indie Oregon bookstores and hustling.

Question: Craig Joseph Danner, whose self-published book “Himalayan Dhaba” was a big hit with indie stores in 2001 and 2002, once said that “it is easier to talk down a blood-soaked psychotic schizophrenic stoned on crystal meth than it is to walk into a bookstore with a self-published book.”

Answer: I used to feel that stigma acutely, but then over the years totally changed my mind. Readers don’t give a damn. If the book is good, the book is good. In indie rock you have street cred if you eschew the mainstream and DIY, tour hard, sell the product at the shows, release weird versions of this and that. In the mainstream literary world, no such mindset exists. But it does for me.

Question: Why do you think it is that we don’t trade intelligence about indie writers/publishers like we do with indie bands?

Answer: That is a great, great Question. I think I do about poets, and I suppose the ’zine scene does some, but it certainly isn’t happening with the same fervor as music. Perhaps it could be if more writing was passed around like songs. The technology allows this but I haven’t seen it happen. And I’m not talking about blogs.

Question: Do you read other self-published authors?

Answer: I do, but mostly Oregon poets. I love this genre, and it’s entirely overlooked. A Newport poet named Tim Sproul really impressed me with his stuff.

Question: Can you introduce us to an Oregon author we might not have heard of?

Answer: Thirty or so years ago, a writer named David Shetzline wrote a classic and gritty novel set on the southern Oregon Coast called “Heckletooth 3.” This is a must read for anyone who loves Oregon literature.

Question: You’re working on a book about the filming of “Sometimes a Great Notion.” How did you get turned on to it?

Answer: I heard a story that a drunk Paul Newman walked into a Toledo bar and cut the legs off a pool table with a chainsaw.

Question: If you owned a time machine that you could use strictly for researching this book, which scene from the making of the movie would you visit?

Answer: The scene where Jo Ben drowns under the log. Kesey was there and everyone was drunk on Scotch, including Newman. I have this from three people who were there.

Question: Do you think you will ever write about anything besides Oregon?

Answer: Probably not. The state is my muse. The stories are endless.