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January 12, 2019

Final Notes from Life on Probation

I sat next to a woman in the lobby of the probation office. She was talking to a friend and the subject was her current boyfriend. Things were a little rocky for a few weeks, but had finally smoothed over after some heart to hearts. They had a unique history together. The boyfriend had slept with her two sisters and her daughter but she could see past all of that. It reminded me of a scene from a novel that’s never been written, nor remotely conceived because no other American writer has ever seen or heard what I have in these meetings.

The meetings are over and with this ending comes the end of my probation poems or whatever they were. Walt Whitman just took over and I let him guide me. I never tried to make the writing conform to any known genre. I became a poet during these moments, really for the first time, and produced poems that I know poetry journals will never publish because they wouldn’t consider them poems. That’s why they are poems.

We shall see if they ever see the light of publishing day outside of this blog. I wrote them to make sense of insanity and to fend off the cannibalization of my being.

We all shook hands and then I drove away for the last time, but I believe my mind will linger here forever. I developed a new, deeper empathy for people during my time in probation. I saw the debasement and destruction of basically decent people. I helped every way I could, from handing out clothes, toiletries, books, gift certificates and clarification of laws and processes. I was transformed into the person and writer I always wanted to become, but never conceived could possibly exist.

I plan to use what I have learned to serve in new ways.

Onward to the future.

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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

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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.

$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.