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February 18, 2022

Songs of Praise

A narrow strip of green paper with printing on it caught my eye. I stopped walking and picked it up. I’ll read anything I find on the ground except product packaging.

I read the strip: “Let us come before him with thanksgiving and sing joyful songs of praise.” The Bible, Psalms 95:2. Good News Translation.

Good News Translation? Never heard of that one. Give me the King James version of give me nothing!

Still, the psalm appealed to me at the precise moment. I haven’t been singing too many songs of praise in my mind or writing lately. How can you if you’re writing almost exclusively about the homeless crisis? There is little to praise there, except the willingness of many people not being paid to care who care a lot and act on their own volition. I suppose I could also praise the incredible resiliency of many people living on streets who are there out of personal or economic collapse or both at the same time.

After reading the slip several times, I continued my walk and thought about other songs of praise I might sing. I started to list them:

Family

Friends

Dogs

Birds

Perry Mason, the TV show with Raymond Burr

Beavers

Street libraries

Oregon’s socialist public beaches

Miles Davis

Squirrels

That someone on Amazon purchased one of my publications the other day and netted me 37 cents

Rivers

The Old Crow Book Club

That’s a lot of songs I could sing!

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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.