Nestucca Spit Press Presents
Two New Books for 2025

Operation 68 - Letters from a Young Missionary in Brazil

On July 18, 1968, a 24-year-old preacher’s wife and mother of two small children sailed from California with her family to Brazil to participate in a Church of Christ missionary service called Operation 68 in the city of Belo Horizonte.

Dawn Engel wrote approximately 400 letters over the course of two years to her parents in Portland, Oregon and a monthly newsletter to the Fort Worth, Texas congregation that supported her family’s role in the mission.

Engel’s extraordinary correspondence, excerpted in Operation 68: Letters From a Young Missionary in Brazil, reveals her unwavering and joyous belief in modeling Jesus’ teachings about serving the sick, destitute and downtrodden. Along the way, she encounters the mystery of an exotic foreign culture, provides stateside comforts for her children (Kool-Aid!) and launches her career as a distinguished elementary school educator who, upon her return to Oregon, never missed a day in 25 years of teaching in public schools.

There has never been a better time for a book about faith-based ministry, or any ministry for that matter. Operation 68: Letters from a Young Missionary in Brazil is a desperately needed narrative of compassion and kindness to counter the bilious story of hate and anger afflicting far too many evangelical Christian communities in America today.

In 2010, One Man’s Beach: A Thousand Rambles Down Nestucca Spit was nearly published by a national publisher. The deal fell through. “Too regional,” someone in New York said. For reasons I no longer recall, I shelved the project. Fifteen years later, I returned to Nestucca Spit and rambled once again, with a new dog, and the experience convinced me to release this book as it was written with a new introduction.

One Man’s Beach is a book of memoir, history, dogs, polemic, sex, beer, ecology, meditation, and photographs about a special stretch of sand and dunes that was almost destroyed in the 1960s by an insane plan to relocate Highway 101 right through it. One man, a politician named Bob Straub saved it forever and I am eternally grateful for his heroism. Without Nestucca Spit and Oregon’s unprecedented legacy of publicly-owned beaches, I would have never become a writer.


Never stop Pre. When he’s no longer relevant in Oregon, Oregon is dead.”

On May 31, 1975, Coos Bay, Oregon native Steve Prefontaine died in an automobile accident. At the time of his death, he held 14 American records in distance running.

Pre was 24 years old and already a legend in Oregon and the world of track of field.

A half century after his tragic end, his remarkable story continues to inspire others on a near mythological level to compete in a multitude of ways, from Phil Knight to a country singer to an Iraqi War vet to an impoverished high school runner to a man battling addictions to an obsessed sculptor and so many more.

In Never Stop Pre: The Enduring Inspiration of America’s Greatest Sports Legend, Matt Love, prolific chronicler of modern Oregon history, races the reader through a decathlon of literary genres to investigate the ongoing phenomenon and spectacular influence of Steve Prefontaine.

Print Edition is $21.99 + $5 Shipping


Kindle Edition $5.99

Never Stop Pre Kindle Edition

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Read and subscribe to Matt Love’s observations on the Substack platform on the crisis of homelessness.


Sonny and the Big Clean-up Day

(A Story for Kids and Adults)

By Matt Love

Sonny the husky discovers a homeless encampment destroying a creek in a Portland city park. She alerts her owner and a park ranger and inspires a community clean-up of the damaged riparian area. Neighborhood citizens and residents of the encampment join Sonny to restore a tiny part of a watershed and later celebrate their collaboration.

Purchase the Sonny and the Big Clean-Up Day PDF and ePub Bundle

Buy eBook on Amazon


Choice Cuts

of Oregon Fiction

Choice Cuts of Oregon Fiction book cover

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.

$22.99 + $3 Shipping

The Old Crow

Book Club

The Old Crow Book Club book cover

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.

$15.99 + $4 Shipping

The Savage

of State Street

The Savage of State Street

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.

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

Special donation to Support Distribution of The Old Crow Book Club.

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