creed

April 14, 2020

Corona Virus Thoughts

A tattooed, bearded, shirtless man did push-ups in the parking lot of the grocery store while his dog curled up snoozing next to his backpack.

President Trump enlisted Creed in the fight against the virus. He requested they write and perform a Fight the Corona Virus RAWK Anthem. In an empty stadium, of course. Creed knows how that goes.

I’ve spent much of the last four weeks planting trees to restore a wrecked, poisoned watershed. It’s fine work and I am totally alone except for birds and plants and bees. I am lucky to have this.

My best friend of late has been a chipmunk.

I’ve read 17 books in three weeks. Four were Westerns. My favorite so far is a biography of the Danish writer Isak Dinesen by Judith Thurman. It might be the best literary biography I have ever read. It teaches you about her incredible life and how to write and how not to live as a writer.

I’ve built 14 snowdrift forts in three weeks.

I’ve written absolutely nothing.

I started my 150^th or so journal last week.

I’m going to make a vegetarian meatloaf.

My peas are coming up.

Is there a market for environmentally-conscious erotica?

I have helped my elderly neighbors.

I have wondered what percentage of Americans have never planted a tree.

You can feel people slipping away.

I miss my great collaborator.

The virus presents an opportunity for many self-reflecting people to revolutionize their lives. I have feeling they don’t have the courage to do it once the dust settles. Back to business as miserable usual.

I watched another Fred Astaire movie. What is it about him and those ascots or scarves or whatever they are called around his neck? He looks the same age in every film and some of them are 30 to 40 years apart. The word that comes to mind when I watch him is: debonair.

Dog fever has struck.

I keep seeing empty cans of Viennese sausages along the road. Is that the food of the apocalypse?

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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.