Oregon Humanities

Epley in Exile

Matt Love, Gold Beach

In early 2008 I wrote a laudatory essay in the Oregonian about Men in Exile, an anthology of Oregon State Penitentiary inmate creative writing published by Oregon State University Press in 1973. I appealed to any contributor reading the piece to contact me. A week later I received an email from Smoky Epley. “I was paroled from the Oregon State Penitentiary [on] January 3, 1972,” Epley wrote,

“and attended the University of Oregon into my senior year. I did not graduate, nor did I pursue a writing career. Instead, I chose to graduate to bank robbery and was arrested by the FBI on October 13, 1979. I was released to a halfway house on July 17, 2007. Yes, that’s twenty-seven years. (Twenty-seven years, nine months and four days, to be exact; but who’s counting.) In your article you said you’d never know but would like to think the contributors had turned their lives around and avoided returning to prison. Now you know that I did not. Not then.” (Letter to author, April 2, 2008)

I responded right away, and Epley and I met in a coffee shop in McMinnville. There, surrounded by high school and college students texting madly, he told me the inside story of the anthology and dazzled me by reciting line after line of classic English poetry. Later that summer, I reintroduced him to Oregon literary society at a reading on a sizzling summer night in Portland when he blew away the crowd with the most explosive performance I’ve ever witnessed at a literary event. We shook hands on the street afterward and then he disappeared—despite multiple emails and phone calls.

Then, in December 2010, I received an email. “My SID [state offender ID] number is 2413771,” Epley wrote, “I didn’t know that until last year … So how did I learn this? I went back to the pen.” Epley had done another twenty-six months for using his girlfriend’s credit card without her permission, and was now living in a group home in Newberg, free again to come and go as he pleased. “Well, not exactly,” Epley continued, “Around the first of November I caught a cold which developed into pneumonia and I went to the hospital. They admitted me immediately. (It was the first time I’d been in a hospital.) After four days they discharged me but wouldn’t let me go without in-home oxygen.” One of the group home’s residents had told him to google himself, and he’d found me again—and discovered I was working on a sequel to Men in Exile.

“Matt, I’m back! Can I help?” he wrote. I emailed Epley back and we later talked on the phone. We make arrangements to meet and catch up in person after the holiday season. I told him I couldn’t wait to read his new stuff, his first writing in almost forty years.