August 18, 2020

Corona Virus Thoughts #12

Pressure from the pandemic cracked a member of my family. He reached out for help and I am doing the best I can from afar. I offer him no agendas nor cliches. Just listen and offer a few suggestions for activities that helped me survive a recent cataclysm, and that might be of some use to him. He’s getting the Siddhartha writing prompts soon.

I’ve almost finished writing the Western. Once I do, I will have written the book in one month. Now I know how Louie L’Amour did it.

The fraudulent assault on voting by mail continues by a President who votes flawlessly by mail.

My mind drifts to old friends long gone. I’d love to hear from them. I’d love to be surprised.

The latest strange wanderer, the long haired guitar man keeps appearing. I don’t know he possibly lives, and with two dogs.

Another strange wanderer showed up yesterday. She’s young, obese, wearing a backpack and walking with two leashed-up collies. How does she possibly live?

I’m reading Butterfied 8 by John O’Hara and liking its decadence, elegant decadence, as opposed to the decadence of driving around town vaping weed in a sedan missing all but the front windshield.

Took a six-mile hike along a river yesterday. Saw some 300-year old Douglas firs that somehow survived the cross cut saw and chainsaw. When I walked by them, it always made me think: these are going to live longer than the United States of America.

I’m working on a pandemic writing curriculum. If only I could teach it somewhere.

I’m thinking about buying an RV, rescuing a mutt, and write the great American RV book (not a novel).

Listening to “Walking in LA” by Missing Persons. What a song! Only a nobody walks in LA…

I saw Michelle Obama on television giving a speech. As I listened, it occurred to me that she could beat Trump by 15 points without ever campaigning. It also occurred to me that she has a duty to her country to do so, something akin as going to war for your country to repel an invasion of the homeland.

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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.