diasporalogo

September 10, 2021

My New Literary Endeavor: The New American Diaspora

Friends of the Meditations Blog:

I invite you to subscribe to my latest literary endeavor, a newsletter called the New American Diaspora. In this newsletter, I write about observing and interacting with the homeless people in Oregon and also those people who have checked out on conventional American life.

Should you subscribe, the newsletter is emailed to your in-box two or three times a week via Substack, a newsletter platform that is helping writers find a wider audience and generate revenue from their writing.

It works like this: you click on this web site (or cut and paste into your browser)

https://mattlove.substack.com/

and it will direct you to the newsletter, where there are several options to subscribe. If you subscribe, each one of the pieces would be emailed to you when I post it. You can also access the archives of previous writings by subscribing. There is no blog or web site or social media outlet to visit. The content comes directly to you. Mine are mostly short reads, but not always.

At some point, I will put up a pay wall for certain content available only to paid subscribers. For the time being, however, the content is free to read in hope that my words will engage your heart and mind and perhaps lead to great notions of understanding and solutions.

Four years ago, I started Meditations. Many of you have read it and became regular readers. I will continue to post there on subjects unrelated to the newsletter, but the blog format has grown outdated, certainly as a model to get paid for writing, and I needed to adapt to the changing market and try generating additional income for my writing on this momentous crisis in our nation.

Thank you for your consideration and I hope you can support this endeavor. Please feel free to share this communication to other potential subscribers.

Matt Love

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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.