rocker

May 30, 2022

One Oregon Day

I wrote a thousand words on three of Studs Terkel’s books.

I wrote 500 words on recycling my high school yearbooks and lamenting the loss of industrial arts classes.

I took a walk through a homeless encampment and park.

I watched an episode of Perry Mason.

I went grocery shopping.

I mailed two of my books to a customer in Michigan.

I cashed my monthly royalty check earned from a 1/32^nd ownership share of an Oklahoma oil and natural gas field. (Payment has tripled since the Russian invasion of Ukraine so I can add war profiteer to my resume.)

I bicycled past a man standing in a homeless encampment. He was holding an acoustic guitar. I stopped and bicycled back to him. I asked him if he would play a song and said I would pay him if he did. He agreed. He played an original metal song called “Euphoric Forest” that astonished me and I gave him a 20-dollar bill. This was the beginning of a half hour conversation that has entirely changed the course of my writing project about the homeless. Just when you think it’s over and know all you need to know…a homeless rocker living in a tent camper surrounded by stuff shreds a metal song on an acoustic guitar and everything is upended.

Shit, that’s what rock and roll is supposed to do! Hadn’t I declared rock dead 25 years ago?

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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.