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September 17, 2019

A Last Workshop?

Last weekend I taught my Zen-fueled writing workshop in Astoria. It was perhaps the last of these unique literary gatherings as I move forward in new unforeseen directions with my teaching and writing. I will miss teaching in the marvelous and inspiring house of my great friends, Jennifer and Holt. They helped save my life and provided a space where so many writers prospered.

Twelve writers participated and we conversed, wrote, shared, laughed, listened and went on a wonderful collaborative journey together that was quite clearly an antidote for these angry, hurried times.

I wrote along with the participants and below is my response to the prompt (taken from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), write about one side of an American coin: (mine was a penny)

The Lincoln Memorial…it’s what we’re supposed to stand for…all the ideals are contained and flow within this edifice. He just sits there in that huge, magisterial chair, with words from the Gettysburg Address etched in marble, great words—the best words of American life that today read like fiction. Or have they always read like fiction? When the Memorial was opened in the 1920s, America was still segregated, the KKK was riding high, and black men were routinely lynched. Think of that contradiction! It’s always the ideal and the reality of American life, that juxtaposition, the eternal struggle to live up to the words of the Gettysburg Address. Do we really even try anymore? At times we have.

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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.