portland1

May 13, 2021

Bicycling Through Homelessness (Part 1)

Saturday. It’s a beautiful Portland morning. I’m biking with a friend into the heart of a unique homeless community. Is that heart dead or alive or somewhere in between? It’s like bicycling into a story, but the story is unknown.

I will report with my eyes and of course I will miss a lot. But I think I can see more on a bicycle ride than a walk. You can subtlety meander on a bike in a way you can’t when walking, and that provides a more expansive yet also secretive scope of vision. That is, if you are looking. I am looking.

(Three hours later)

Okay, I thought I would narrate my ride with a present tense chronological treatment, but what I saw made that impossible. There was absolutely nothing linear about it although I did go from point A to Point Z.

How am to write about what I saw on this ride, which was more of a coast, a coasting through homelessness, physically and metaphorically, and the good thing about coasting through homelessness is that you get to coast right through and leave it behind in reality and metaphor, but as a writer I don’t want to leave what I saw behind, so I guess the technique I will employ here is to provide some images and observations and meanderings, and also offer very few insights because I still don’t know what the hell it was I saw. And if that last Faulkneresque sentence barely makes sense, then I wrote the perfect sentence to introduce this subject because what I saw on this ride through homelessness defies conventional literary treatment of any kind, at least any kind I am aware of. It is the first subject in my writing life that I don’t know how to approach. I keep hoping an idea will come to me, but nothing has yet emerged, so I guess I’ll just riff away here and call it an essay, or better yet, I’ll assay what I saw on my ride, meaning I will wrestle with it.

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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.