loveletter

March 11, 2019

Thoughts While Driving in Rain (again)

Rain slides the highway into the sea. Rain buckles the road. Rain brings rocks and mud down from the hills. Rain sends creeks across the shoulders.

I am driving through it, sloshing, sliding, surfing, on my way into the mountains and snow flurries.
Horses, goats, sheep and cattle stand angled into rain or take shelter under scrawny oaks or Doug firs. If there is an image that conjures depression, this is it.

I tune in a radio station playing songs I’ve never heard. One woman (Bonnie Raitt?) sings about writing a love letter listening to a love song on the radio. It’s a great song and she makes me believe she is writing a love letter, a dearly departed literary genre.

Past flooded fields. Past a herd of elk. Past fallen oaks. Past grim towns. Past so many abandoned homes and farms. People used to live there. People still could live there. Why aren’t these properties being repurposed to address the housing and homeless crisis? Why isn’t there a new Homestead Act, that invites people willing to put some sweat and improvements into the property, build equity in it, make something happen. Anything is better than decay. I don’t have the answers; I am just observing and thinking as I drive. I see these places all the time and the bones on them look decent. They are rigged for power and water and septic. There is land to grow food. Imagine a program, a partnership between banks, government, churches, non profits, housing/homeless advocates and absentees property owners to rehab a thousand such derelict properties in rural Oregon over a five-year period. Operation Re-Homestead Oregon. It could work. It’s not working now.

Driving on. Hundreds of boats, cars and RVs abandoned in fields or driveways. Why? Someone made an investment once. What happened?

I switch my mind to writing fiction and where I want to go after the Bonnie and Clyde book comes out. It was excruciating to write and fiction offers a certain liberation that I crave. I want to transport myself away from where I have been in recent years, to a place where I am in control of the narrative and characters. I have two solid idea for novels and a host of Oregon tales to write.

Here comes the snow flurries. I need to concentrate. I turn off country radio and put my mind to it.

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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.