kramer

March 15, 2019

Coffee Shop Ruminations

The tattooed barista pours me a cup of drip coffee and I repair to m favorite table near the lending library. The Beatles play through the speakers.

The shop is packed full of city people doing city things. I guess I am doing city things in here but typing this on my trusty Alphasmart word processors from the 1990s makes it seem like an uncity activity.

I look forward to better weather so I can take the typewriter outside and start typing letters

I may start the meth-themed Western on the typewriter. It somehow seems appropriate.

I had a wonderful reunion with an old friend and we sat inside a driftwood fort and caught up and planned for some future creative collaborations. I certainly will need her unique insight and editorial input on some new writing projects.

I turned 55 on March 10 and had one of the best birthday celebrations of my life. Onward into my AARP status!

I enjoyed all the birthdays messages and calls from people. I responded to every one.

Potential new author clients are emerging. I hope to expand this business. I truly love it. It’s a form of teaching yet totally different than a classroom experience.

I scored an almost brand new Jack Kramer Autograph tennis racket during a recent trip to a thrift store. This baby was pressed in a sweet wooden press and has a Jack Kramer head cover. Tennis anyone? I’ll be hitting off a backboard soon and see if I still have anything left from the glory days. It’s been almost 15 years since I hit a tennis ball. I want to reacquaint myself with the game. I know playing will unlock some interesting new creative energies in my mind.

The recent writing workshop in Astoria turned out to be one the best of my career. Five new writers! Such diverse range of ideas for books. Incredible passion displayed! The talent nearly blew up the room. Teaching these workshops inspires such unexpected ideas and insight for me. It often feels as if the light bulbs won’t stop lighting up over my head. I hope I can continue teaching these workshops in the future. They teach me and I hope I never come to a place in my life here I can’t be taught or teach myself something new.

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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.