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February 25, 2022

An Orb of Beaverwood

My mind meandered as I walked in the park. Below me, a tiny creek gurgled its way to the ocean. How many Americans could correctly answer this question: where is this creek ultimately flowing? I’d guess less than 30 percent. But they all know who played Captain Kirk or who won the Super Bowl.

It was early morning and cold. I looked down to the creek as I always do, checking out the crazy Daffy ducks and praying for the stray choice cut of beaverwood.

Something golden in color and round in shape, roughly the size of a bowling ball, bobbled in the current. It was blocked by a downed tree. I stopped and stared hard at it.

It couldn’t be! Yet I knew it was because I am the world’s leading authority on the subject. It was a choice cut of Oregon beaverwood gnawed into a preposterous shape by one of my bucktoothed friends.

It could vanish any moment down the creek if the current shifted. The horror! The horror!

I had to possess it! I had to add it my new collection that is gradually taking over my writing studio and bedroom. Am I the only person in America, or the world for that matter, whose principle interior decorating scheme is displaying choice cuts of beaverwood? Yes! Yes! Yes!

I clambered down the bank. Brambles whipsawed my chest and thighs. I stood on the log corralling my sacred treasure. I took several steps on the log’s slick surface. I used another piece of beaverwood the length and girth of a golf club, to guide the treasure to shore. I reached down to pick it up. Oh the glory! It was no mere choice cut. The word orb instantly came to mind. A beaverwood orb with divine powers of revelation! I would display it in my studio under a soft light and ask all manner of advice of it. It would reveal everything I needed to know about improving my frustrated life in the big city.

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Nestucca Spit Press Presents A New E-book

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.

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The Old Crow

Book Club

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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

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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.

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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.