Author: whatcathyreadnext

My guest today is Micah Thorp whose novel, Aegolius Creek is published today by Type Eighteen Books. Congratulations, Micah! Read on as I chat with Micah about Aegolius Creek and the inspiration behind it.

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About the Book

Don Karlsson has lived on his family’s Oregon homestead for most of his life. The timber on his land is his greatest asset—planted and replenished by his hand, maintained with his labor and sweat, and harvested for income at his discretion.

After a new species of voles is discovered living in those trees, authorities step in to protect the creatures, and Karlsson fights back. No one can tell him what to do with his property. He enlists the help of his children: Billy, a local who understands his father’s connection to the land; Stacy, a fierce attorney from Boston determined to represent her father’s interests—even if they go against her own; and the beloved and sensitive youngest, Zeke, who organizes local environmentalists to make sure his father does not win.

The impending confrontation engulfs the community and competing interests—local businesses and political groups, infiltrators seeking profit—with the Karlsson family at the center, still trying to reconcile the loss of Don’s wife and their mother, Marlene. Tempers flare, desperate acts are taken, and the courtroom battle spills over into protests and riots, leading to a riveting and stunning conclusion.

Format: Paperback (198 pages) Publisher: Type Eighteen Books
Publication date: 16th September 2025 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

Find Aegolius Creek on Goodreads

Purchase Aegolius Creek from Amazon UK or Type Eighteen Books

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Interview with Micah Thorp, author of Aegolius Creek

What was the inspiration for the story?

The most famous book about western Oregon, Sometimes a Great Notion, was written by Ken Kesey in the 1960s. He was well known for One Flew Over a Cuckoo’s Nest (and a rather eccentric bus ride he took with the Grateful Dead), but Sometimes a Great Notion is considered by many to be his best work. It’s a story about a rural Oregon family running a small timber company in the mid twentieth century.

I grew up not far from where Kesey lived and had relatives in the area described by his Oregon novel. There was a certain culture that existed in the mid twentieth century in rural western Oregon; rugged and very independent, that I understood well. During my youth that culture dramatically changed. Conflict over harvesting timber on public lands pitted the environmental community against local blue-collar workers. The subsequent changes led to the dismantling of much of the industry. I wanted to write about the effect those changes had on the people and communities that went through them.

Why did you particularly want to explore the conflict between individual rights and environmental concerns?

Aside from the conflict that surrounded my upbringing, I think the topic is prescient. We are in the midst of a period in which concerns about climate change are going to be confronted by groups that must give something up to slow global warming. Understanding and resolving these conflicts is necessary to bring about change.

A central problem in these confrontations is a level of certainty that pervades different groups which often undermines the very position they advocate. In Aegolius Creek I tried to carefully balance the differing points of view and let the reader empathize with all of them. This particular conflict (land rights vs environment protection) isn’t particularly unique in the sense that the problem is complicated, while the arguments about it are simplistic. Only when you dig into the details are you confronted by implications of completely adopting one point of view – which is generally destructive. Dialectical thinking isn’t easily adapted by most, but it makes great fodder for a writer.

How important to the story is the book’s setting?

Very. The book is about place, both as a concept and a reality. Aegolius Creek is a fictional place, but quite similar to a number of different rural areas up and down the Willamette Valley. In order to make Aegolius Creek feel real, I devoted a short soliloquy about the Aegolius Creek Valley at the beginning of each chapter, a number of which are based on the real characteristics of real communities.

How did you go about creating your main character, Don Karlsson?

I had family members that could be a pretty easily substitute for Don – hard working, intense and remarkably reflective. He doesn’t change much through the course of the book – he’s an anchor for the story and the other characters revolve around him.

One of the important things I knew I needed to do with Don was detail the complexities of his point of view. It would be hard to empathize with him without his backstory or appreciating his point of view in some detail. With a pretty quiet, austere personality it was important to get inside his head a bit.

Were there any scenes that were particularly challenging to write? If so why?

The climactic scene in the book (which I won’t spoil) was difficult because I wanted to write it from a number of different perspectives all at once without losing any of the emotional punch. It made the sequencing difficult.

One of the things I was aware of as I was writing was juxtaposing point of view and tense. The prologue and epilogue are in first person past tense, from the point of view of a character that isn’t in the rest of the book. In the body of the story I primarily use third person present tense, but there are places where Don’s point of view is italicized in first person present or past tense.

The book has been described as ‘a vision of a disappearing world’. Do you agree with this assessment?

Yes and no….

There were a number of changes that occurred between the 1970s and 2000’s that affected the timber industry and all the communities built around it. The inability to cut timber on public lands obviously had an effect as did the subsidizing of Canadian logging. Automation reduced the number of loggers and millworkers needed. The lost tax revenues timber communities needed to support their public services were initially offset by funding from the federal government, but eventually the lack of jobs led to their decline.

With all these difficulties, the timber industry is still alive, if only a shell of its former self. At its peak Oregon timber harvests were around 10 billion board feet a year. By 2010 they had declined to less than a quarter of that.

Timber communities haven’t gone away, but many are a shell of what they once were.

Thank you, Micah, for such fascinating answers to my questions.

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About the Author

Micah Thorp is a physician, writer, and lifelong Oregonian. His research has been published in numerous medical journals, and his short fiction has appeared in various literary journals. His first novel, Uncle Joe’s Muse, won a 2022 Next Generation Indie Book Award and a Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. His sequel, Uncle Joe’s Senpai, was a finalist for the Foreword Indies Book of the Year Award. Micah’s novel, Aegolius Creek, is the recipient of a 2025 IPPY Independent Publisher Book Award: West-Pacific Best Regional Fiction.

Connect with Micah
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