falls

March 17, 2022

Sweet Socialism Birthday

I toured around Silver Falls State Park on a cold and sunny morning that happened to coincide with my 58^th birthday. In fact, I had decided to visit the park for the first time in 30 years to celebrate my birthday. It occurred to me admiring the falls, the creek, the forests, the birds, that I wasn’t really their to admire anything connected with nature. I was there to admire the sweet success of Oregon socialism during the New Deal.

The CCC and WPA built this magnificent state park and recreation area during the throes of the Great Depression. Hundreds of men lived on site and worked for $1 a day for seven years because there was no other employment until WW II arrived.

Every man who worked here is dead now but the stone walls, stone buildings, bridges and trails live on, and will live on until it all goes back to seed when human have vanished from the earth.

Just think that they built this place largely by hand in ways not far removed from building the Great Pyramid. Just think how this monumental labor built something tangible, beautiful and useful that anyone can enjoy today. How many of us can say that about our life’s work. I can’t about my teaching career. I can about my career in watershed restoration and publishing.

Thank you New Deal, FDR and the boys (and probably a few women in disguise) of the CCC and WPA for building this for me to enjoy. I’ll never stop spreading the sweet stories of Oregon socialism in my writing. They are all around me.

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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.