Mark Leavenworth RIP

Mark Leavenworth died of a heart attack on Halloween morning. I received the terrible news listening to a voice mail in an alcove of a Hammond diner. It felt like an overinflated tire had exploded inside me.

My friend. Co-founder with me of the Old Crow Book Club. The direct inspiration for my book about the club. Bibliophile. Zealot for the Dune novels. Oregon history buff. The most astute reader of my books I’ve ever encountered. A father and grandfather. A man who lived on the streets of Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood for a decade.

I met him in the winter of 2021 after returning to Portland to care for my invalid father.

Long term readers might recall the many stories I wrote for this newsletter that chronicled our unique, spirited friendship and long frustrating journey we took together to secure him housing. At long last, after two years, in 2024, Mark moved into a Safe Rest Village. When I heard that news, I considered my effort on his behalf as one the most important achievements of my life.

In 2025, I moved to Coos Bay after the death of my father, and Mark and I said our goodbye at a farewell party for the Old Crow Book Club at a tiny park along a creek. He was housed, looking better, drinking less, and selling the Street Roots newspaper about homelessness for a meager subsistence. I wished him well and felt great about his prospects for eventually making a transition into a subsidized apartment.

Now time for the disclosure of a horrible truth.

Three or four months ago, Mark left his Safe Rest Village and returned to the homeless life in Sellwood. I am still piecing together from people in Portland exactly what transpired. Did he leave voluntarily? Kicked out for being absent too long? A combination of both? His imminent departure after the two-year limit was looming. Had he been working with social workers to make the transition into an apartment? There are many unanswered questions, and I may never discover them.

I do know Mark detested the chaos and noise of life in the Safe Rest Village, especially when he was moved to one out in the boondocks of North Portland. Still, he was off the streets.

And then he was right back where I’d met him when he was reading my novel called The Great Birthright on a sidewalk near the Sellwood Plaid Pantry. He’d found the book in a free street library.

On Halloween morning he slept on the deck of a Sellwood bookstore and then walked across the street to the Plaid Pantry and bought a cup of coffee. He repaired to the sidewalk adjacent to the store, an informal salon as we used to call it, suffered a heart attack, and died.

To repeat because somehow it bears repeating, although as of yet I don’t know what this cosmic convergence means (if there is meaning), Mark died at exactly the same spot where we’d met.

I just know he had a book stuffed in his backpack. He always did.

At this moment, as I write this seized with grief, I cannot make sense of Mark’s return to homelessness and death on the sidewalk. Perhaps understanding will come later—or never.

I do know that Mark Leavenworth enriched my life in ways that heretofore I never imagined.

Thank you for that Mark. And yes, I will give the Dune novels another try.

On the drive home down Highway 101 back to Coos Bay the day after Mark’s death, I thought of my friend and our extraordinary, unconventional friendship, and collaboration.

At one point, I stopped at a wayside north of Florence to run Elmer. We ran on the beach until we reached Bob Creek as it emptied into the ocean. There, I built a memorial driftwood fort/sculpture for Mark. By now, a tide has washed it away.