Nestucca Spit Press Presents
“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
ePub Edition $5.99
Kindle Edition $5.99
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.
Choice Cuts
of Oregon Fiction
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 Old Crow
Book Club
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.
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.
Special donation to Support Distribution of The Old Crow Book Club.