Welcome to Michael Strelow’s website. Contact me at: mstrelow@willamette.edu
Upcoming readings and appearances: 2021 was a slow and Zoomy year for appearances of any sort–something about Covid, if I remember right. We all harbor great hopes for 2022!
Feb 29, 2020, six authors at Jen’s Bookstore in Beaverton, OR–excellent time.
Jan 20, Lecture and reading for Institute for Continued Learning at Willamette University: “Autobiography of the making of a novel–The Moby-Dick Blues.”
December 8th, Sunday, noon to four, at the Oregon Historical Society’s annual Holiday Cheer Book Sale with over 80 Oregon authors to sign books and chat. Also carolers, hot chocolate, goodies. Free admission In Portland across from the Art Museum.
December 15th at Jan’s Bookstore: Come and chat and see great books at Jan’s in Beaverton, 12320 SW 1st St, Beaverton, OR From ten am until noon.
Nov 4th, 2019, Release of Jake’s Book, third book in the middle grade chapter book series, The Princess Gardener.
Dec. 8th, 2019, Sunday: noon to 4pm, Oregon Historical Society Christmas Book
Sale of Oregon authors. At the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.
New children’s book, third in The Princess Gardener series: Jake’s Book, will be published on November 4th, 2019. All three books can be read separately but together connect and make one larger story too. This trilogy is MG or middle grade chapter books (ages approx. 8 to 12 years, see below for some of my philosophy in writing more complex syntax in MG books).
New novel: Some Assembly Required
From Scott Nadelson, author of the novel, Between You and Me and short story collections: Saving Stanley, The Cantor’s Daughter:Stories, Aftermath: Stories and The Next Scott Nadelson
“If Saul Bellow had written science fiction, it might read like Michael Strelow’s Some Assembly Required: erudite and allusive, delighting in language, but also wildly funny and entertaining. A page-turning meditation on the multiplicity of voices each of us carries—those we use to reach out to others, those that exist only in our heads—this novel illuminates the beautiful and mysterious transformation that occurs when we listen carefully, turning all the noise that surrounds us into harmony.”
Early reviews of Some Assembly Required:
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars Full Text: What I found most notable about this book was the way the author’s voice carried through. This is a science fiction story with a creative plot, but I was most engaged by the humor and satirical take the author had in this topic. Well worth a read for science fiction fans and those seeking a good book. NetGalley Review
I am not a huge Sci-Fi fan, but I love a good story regardless of the genre. Because of this, I want to say that I am happy that I was the one from the Reading Badger magazine who got to read Michael Strelow’s “Some Assembly Required” novel. The book has as its main character a journalist named Jake James, who presents himself as a person who hears voices, but it is not a mentally sick person.
Even from the beginning, the author has a great way of inducing you the thoughts and feelings of the character. When you read the book, you have the feeling that you are connected directly to the mind of a schizophrenic. Because of this, you cannot figure out all of the time, if some of the conversations are really happening or they are just in Jake’s mind.
“Life was just a package of information and was infinitely extendable”
After Jake assists at an Artificial Intelligence presentation made by Dr. Sewall, he searches the doctor to interview him. He discovers that the doctor has done an experiment and transferred a form of AI to a bowl of oatmeal. From this point, all the book’s action escalates. The bowl of oatmeal, called by the name of Rex, evolves and learns how to communicate and other cool stuff (that I am not going to spoil).
Michael Strelow amazingly presents the conversations between the characters and creates a not so easy to read book, but nevertheless one that will stick to the reader’s minds. I don’t usually add quotes to my articles, but in this case, I don’t know what to say that will do justice to this novel, without spoiling the future readers the pleasure of discovering this story, so I will let you read my favourite paragraph:
“Mitochondria, for instance, was once a free-range critter that for some fortuitous reason found a home in the human replication system. Now it goes to work schlepping materials…never stopping for lunch. Be sure to feed your mitochondria – keep them happy – so the rest of the system can get reproducing.”
This Reading Badger’s final thoughts about this novel
My honest belief is that this novel deserves to be a bestseller of the genre, so stay tuned for its December release. Even though I have already read the digital edition provided in advance on Netgalley, I liked the story so much that I will order the paper print version for my collection. Usually, I finish each article with my own opinions and feelings, but in this case, I cannot think of another conclusion better than an excerpt from the book:
“Rex out playing actually made more sense of the world than considering the world without Rex.” NetGalley Review
ANOTHER NEW NOVEL, publication date, March 30, 2018, is The Moby-Dick Blues. Suppose you discovered the (long lost) original manuscript for Moby-Dick? What would it be worth and to whom?: good guys, bad guys, sneaky guys and legitimate collectors and libraries. And what if the money from it could save your family business?
The Moby-Dick Blues

A middle grade (MG) children’s book now available in bookstores and on line, The Princess Gardener
A couple of early reviews for The Princess Gardener:
| Apr 30, 2018: Belinda Clemens | NetGalley I loved this book alot. It is well written and really enjoyable. I read it in one sitting. Eugenie and Alyssa ending was surprisingly wonderfully unique. I want to read more by this author. |
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| Apr 20, 2018: Dan Pawley | NetGaley Thanks for the advanced copy of this one. Over to my ten year old daughter to tell us what she thought…I love this book because after the first page or so, I felt like Eugenie was my best friend and I’d known her all my life. The storyline is intriguing and once the action had started, I couldn’t put the book down. If I had to rewrite the book, I would not change a thing! I would 100% recommend the book to anyone who likes adventure and fantasy. I feel like this book will be a bestseller! |
A princess finds she’s happiest when working in the garden, not doing her princess duties. One day she discovers a farm girl who is her exact duplicate. The girls plot to swap lives. The kingdom is at risk from bad water management; disease and sickness begin. Two obstacles stand in the way of the girls saving the day: a brother and a palace fop are keeping the girls from saving the kingdom from its own eco-ignorance.
THE PRINCESS GARDENER, due out April 27th, 2018.
Out October of 2018, book two of The Princess Gardener. Book two is called, THE ALYSSA CHRONICLE.
My 2005 novel, The Greening of Ben Brown, was a finalist for the Ken Kesey Novel Award of the Oregon Literary Arts. This book is about water, ecology, love, a small town, and the strength of community. Not incidentally, it’s about a man who is turned green in an electrical accident, moves to a small town and affects everyone. (This greening really happened to man in western Pennsylvania in the 1950s). Even the strangest characters in town are made more normal for having a green neighbor. His name is Brown, and the guy at the gas station becomes a local hero for being able to greet Mr. Brown without a hitch while looking at green skin and saying, “Good morning Mr. Brown.” The Town of East Leven, Oregon, on the Willamette River, its factory with chemical settling ponds, its citizens, is as much the hero of this story as is the green man. This is my love letter to small towns everywhere.
BIO: I am an emeritus professor of English and American Studies at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. I have published poetry, short stories, and non-fiction in a number of literary magazines including: The Bellingham Review, Sou’wester,Willow Spring, Kansas Quarterly, Mid-West Poetry Review, Poetry Midwest, Oregon Quarterly, Northwest Review, Orchids, Hubbub, Cutbank, and others. My other books : Kesey (non-fiction about Ken Kesey), and An Anthology of Northwest Writing: 1900-1950. See also article, “All that Hoo-Ha” in Spit in the Ocean # 7: All about Ken Kesey, Penguin Books, 2003, edited by Ed McClanahan. Now available: novel, The Moby-Dick Blues, about lost love, and the original manuscript for Moby-Dick (long lost).
From my novel, May 2013: Henry: A Novel of Beer and Love in the West
This novel is based loosely on the life of Henry Weinhard, 19th century brewer and entrepreneur in Portland, Oregon. As a German immigrant to the West, Henry brought Old World training as a brewer and New World youth and vigor to the West just opening to commerce, avarice and social experiment. Now available on Amazon in paperback or Kindle. (Sample Chapter below)
Chapter II from Henry: A Novel of Beer and Love in the West
Portland, Oregon 1856-1900
The water is awful, and it makes men so sick they can’t work. And if they can’t work, no one makes any money. Better they drink beer. It keeps them healthy and healthy men are good workers. Everybody makes a living.
The woods come right to the edge of town like the Schwarzwald in the old country—dark, and heavy with moisture and dead branches. The only difference is that here the woods don’t have any stories. In Germany there were tales of woodsmen and their families, of witches and evil spirits and things that lived in live oak branches and lived in dead oak branches. The stories were of familiars and monsters that filled the woods, and you only had to spend a night there to get in touch with both. These Oregon woods, on the other hand, are waiting for their stories although some tell me that the Indians have their share already; they are always reluctant tell us what they are.
So we’ll fill the woods eventually, I suppose. But right now it’s just sweat and cursing. The men are glad for the wages, come into town each night thirsty and can’t drink the foul water without the risk of losing three days’ wages bent over shooting yellow water out the top end and black out the bottom. The Indians laugh at them and have a word they tell me means something like “bad camper.” The beer is a good answer to the whole situation. The men come in thirsty, they drink my beer until they’re not thirsty anymore, and then they look up from the beer and want women. Lately, I’ve been able to supply them with both.
It started when one bar run by a drunken Englishman, Bartholomew Cummings, who had no self-discipline and who couldn’t keep his employees from stealing from him, couldn’t pay his beer bill two months in a row. He was relieved to find I would take a percentage of his business and forgive the bill. Within six months I had a quarter of his business, within a year, half. I put in the girls upstairs then, and that boosted both of our takes. He proved to be quick learner at first and saw the possibilities of the added revenue. The girls were tractable, easier to work with than the men in the bar. But he kept up his drinking and bad management. And then he couldn’t keep his hands off the girls. And that was the end of that. I owned most of his bar by then, so I fired him. He hung around cursing me to the workers, drunk and sober. Maligning me to my own workers in front of my own brewery. Most of my workers didn’t speak much English so it didn’t really matter, but still, the principle of the thing was at stake. His antics drunk and sober continually aggrieved me, though no one in the Portland German community gave him any credence. He began to allege among strangers that I had stolen his business and was running a house of vice against community standards, that I paid off police. My reputation as a sound businessman held its ground for all who knew of me. But so many strangers were coming into Portland in 1868**, and Cummings was spending all his waking hours on his defamation project, that finally I knew I had to do something.
I had two new workers, Thomas and Johann, young men straight from my home region of Baden-Wurttemberg in Germany. Neither spoke English or had any friends outside the German community in town. I explained to them what this Englisher was about each day, his unrelenting project to shame me in my new hometown. How I had even offered him a modest stake to leave town and go try his luck elsewhere in the West. How he spit at my offer. Shook his fist at me. Called me the vile names that his English language is so efficient at. They both understood my chagrin, of course. And almost at the same time, they asked me what they could do to help. The one was an apprentice cooper, Johann, with forearms like the oak he worked, like the iron hoops he hammered into place. The other, Thomas, rolled barrels all day up the ramps and into the wagons. Both strong young men. I said I thought that Cummings might forget his bile if he were convinced that I truly felt he should no longer pursue his public vilification. They nodded and looked at each other.
I heard later that Cummings was taken to the edge of town hog-tied in a wagon and there the two young men decided that the way they could convince him of their seriousness, of my displeasure, was to beat him severely. I never saw the results of the beating, but I heard that Cummings was missing most of his front teeth, had one eye drooping and sightless, and walked with a marked limp before he was well enough to leave town. I have to say that I would not have prescribed such harsh medicine for so small a malady as Cummings. But the young men being young men decided on their own both the medicine and the dosage. I recognized quickly that their punishment was in keeping with the Old World version of civility. That a breach of etiquette against a man of my stature in the community called for stern measures and that the whole fabric of propriety itself was implicated in the effectiveness of the message they conveyed to Cummings. I raised both their wages as soon as possible but not so high as to fracture the wage structure all workers expect. I watched them both for signs of the high seriousness that precedes promotion to more responsible positions.
The girls upstairs at the bar were rarely a problem. There were squabbles, of course. But a strong leader among the girls often stopped problems before they manifested themselves. At first the managers tried to make one of the white girls the leader who settled matters of dissention. The Negroes and Italians would listen to her, defer to her, he figured. But it quickly became obvious that the girls would sort out their own leader based on something besides skin color. It was never clear just what. But the managers reported they let the girls do their own politics, and that worked unless there were two very strong girls at the same time with neither willing to take second place to the other. It turned out that stalemate was very rare for some reasons that were not entirely clear to any of us males.
After two years I had three bars with busy upstairs just like the first. What seemed like the accident of not paying the beer bill just continued to happen with the second and third. I didn’t want any more bars or I could have had more. Germans owned almost half the bars in Portland. The improvident English and Irish just didn’t seem to have the knack for running bars in the West, while Germans usually made a go of it—girls or no girls. But the girls provided a steady income, almost monotonous in its certainty. Through rainy, dark winter, sap rising in the spring, exhausting heat of late summer, the men treated themselves with perfect predictability to delights of the flesh.
The world of Portland was divided into two distinct camps—the family men and their families and then the men alone who worked the river and woods. And it was the men alone who drank more beer and used the girls to compensate for the lack of family and hearth. It was a poor alternative, but it seemed that the one might substitute perfectly for the absence of the other. At least it became clear that it was an economic certainty in a world of uncertain finances. Banks might fail from bad management, unlucky investments or the vicissitudes of international funding, but the girls gave good value and steady income.
The damn Scottish kept to themselves and hoarded their money and waited for certainties in a place of uncertainties. The men of Dundee, the Earl of Airlie, the Scots’ Mercantile Guild—they hem and haw and feel their pockets as if they were missing the crooked farthing given them by a grandfather. They drink to excess only at home. They turn their heads away from an honest German money question as if I had asked them intimate details of their marriage beds. Reid the other day, fatuous greasy skinflint that he is, proposed a mercantile plan for the waterfront that would have shoveled dollars into his pockets out of the public coffers. Not that any of us wouldn’t have loved the deal ourselves, but Reid had the bad taste to make the theft so obvious that it would have stood as an insult to every other businessman’s acuity.
The young English males, on the other hand, seem to have a patent world view–they came into the Portland country well dressed, broke and waving around manners and then looking to see if they could find one of Captain Couch’s daughters to marry. It happened enough times that it became a local joke. But the other English have been here from the beginning, the shrewd hard workers. Corbett, Failing, Couch and their henchmen are not as tight as the Scots but every one of them has some kind of sweetheart deal with an eastern supplier. You never see the tip of their money much less the base. Corbett ran deals around the San Francisco wholesalers for the first time years ago and never looked back. He and Failing now are so tight you couldn’t slip a skinny Scot between them. They sit at meetings looking off into space as if they had no need to talk it over; they share a brain, some say.
But down at the river docks is where the machine that drives all of this commences its chugging. The day workers, whoever was the last to arrive with the least skills, walk the planks from the boats and wheel the warehouses full. Wheat for Spaulding’s mill upstream, bolts of cloth headed for Corbett’s storage, china and soap and wax and salt beef and plowshares and the tinker’s solder—they all came in by boat until the railroad. The same men invested in the railroad who had the steamboat monopoly because they saw the changeover coming. It wasn’t hard to see the handwriting on the wall, really. And the two—water and land—together just about tied up all the loose ends. Transport had to just sit back and watch the land fill up and create demand for their services. It’s never that simple, of course. Some people need to die, some need to be cheated while the cheaters look over their shoulders waiting for the public anger. There needs to be veniality and civic conniving and self-serving. There needs to be great ideas, and beer has always been one of them.
Beer stands for the transformation itself, from woods to stump field to house to mansion. Beer is magic. You start with some raw things and end up with a cooked thing far superior to any of the raw parts. The same relationship exists between a tree and a house, a boy and a man. There needs to be the transformation and it needs to be managed carefully or you end up building a falling down shack, making a criminal, concocting awful beer. It always surprises me how few men can do the managing of the magic.
To purchase Henry: A Novel of Beer and Love in the West
go to: amazon.com or your local bookstore can order it for you.
Amazon reviews of The Greening of Ben Brown
MICHAEL STRELOW HAS GIVEN NORTHWEST READERS an amazing fable for our time and place featuring Ben Brown, a utility lineman who transforms into the Green Man following an industrial accident. Eco-Hero and prophet, the Green Man heads a cast of wonderful and zany characters who fixate over sundry items from filberts to hubcaps. A timely raid on a company producing heavy metals galvanizes Strelow’s mythical East Leven as much as the Boston Tea Party rallied Boston. Fascinating, humorous, and wise, The Greening of Ben Brown deserves its place on bookshelves along with other Northwest classics. —CRAIG LESLEY, author of Storm Riders
IF THE GREEN MAN OF MEDIEVAL LORE appeared in Oregon — the mystic version of Strelow’s Oregon — and if the ghost of Kesey helped keep the tale irreverent but strangely tender for place, person, and our chance, then you would hold in your hands The Greening of Ben Brown. And so you do. Let this quiet mystery take you where you need to be. — KIM STAFFORD, author of The Muses Among Us and Other Pleasures of the Writer’s Craft
WITH ITS RICHLY CULTIVATED AND CAREFULLY TENDED PROSE, The Greening of Ben Brown is a compelling examination of community and what it means to love the land, for, as these characters teach us, there shall never be another quite like it. — GINA OCHSNER, author of The Necessary Grace to Fall.
THE GREENING OF BEN BROWN is about communities, physical and emotional. It is a tale of wonders and everyday things. This is a wise book. While it might seem to be intrinsically about the Northwest, it is about universal things. Not many novels mean as much, entertain as much and stimulate as much as The Greening of Ben Brown.—STATESMAN JOURNAL
THE GREENING OF BEN BROWN is an intriguing debut novel. —SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
AN ENGLISH TEACHER AT WILLAMETTE UNIVERSITY, Strelow resonates as both poet and storyteller. In creating inhabitants of a town, its central figure and a strong sense of place, he lays on description lavishly, almost breathlessly, in both broad and detailed strokes. The author lovingly invokes a particular brand of Pacific Northwest magic realism, a blend of fable, social realism, wry wisdom and irreverence that brings to mind Ken Kesey, Tom Robbins and the best elements of a low-key mystery. —THE OREGONIAN
STRELOW’S POWERFUL DESCRIPTIVE LANGUAGE in The Greening of Ben Brown proves beyond a doubt that he is an author to watch in the future. —JACKSON FREE PRESS
DEBUT NOVELIST MICHAEL STRELOW’S prose is wonderfully descriptive, especially in describing the natural characteristics of East Leven, and clearly demonstrates his affection for the state he’s called home for more than thirty years. —THE ABSINTHE LITERARY REVIEW
Contact me at: mstrelow@willamette.edu
Some Links of Interest
Short story in Cirque Journal, “The Fisherman’s Wife:
Short story about the West in Cirque Journal, Vol 6, No 1, December 2014, Page 72: Michael Strelow “The Fisherman’s Wife”
An interview with the author in Cirque Journal, Vol 7 No. 1 Winter Solstice 2015, page 119.
One Amazon Review of The Greening of Ben Brown:
I love plants, and for some reason I picked up this book. I’m normally not an impulse shopper, but this one just grabbed me. I found The Greening of Ben Brown to be a hysterical spoof on much that is sacred in this funny world we live in. The author can really write…when he wrote about green, I felt and saw GREEN. And when he wrote about wet, I felt like I was in a downpour. Much like a Tom Robbins novel, this book just kept me giggling, yet it had a timeless message as well. I’d definitely recommend it, and rate it next to my other favorites such as Bee Season, Memoirs of a Geisha and Kite Runner.
Michael Strelow's website 