coon

July 20, 2022

July 2022 Scenes

Two young raccoons eating apples in a tree.

A woman in a dive bar talking about her latest cocaine binge and upcoming trip to Costa Rica.

Drivers stopping in the middle of the I-405 bridge in Portland, getting out of their vehicles to take photographs of Fourth of July fireworks. Such behavior perfectly illustrates the supreme and dangerous narcissism afflicting so many contemporary Americans.

Three men passed out in the grass of a park with hot dogs, buns and condiments strewn about him.

A tarot card reading on a sidewalk by a soothsayer drunk on malt liquor.

Congressional hearing documenting Republican treason, insurrection and insanity.

Finding yet another great Elmore Leonard novel in a street library.

An elderly couple driving round Southeast Portland looking for their homeless son and his girlfriend.

A meth miscreant shooting hoops in a city park at seven in the morning.

Ducklings swimming in a former casting pond built by the WPA.

An obviously deranged man drinking hot chocolate and eating Lucky Charms while standing.

A dog bounding into the ocean.

A deer eating raspberries from a table.

A woman wearing nothing but a tarp around her.

An elderly man dressing up as a kind of fairy and roaming around a park.

The moment a writer realized he had to cut 190,000 words out of 200,000 already written about Oregon’s homeless crisis.

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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.