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NB: I guess I can answer that in two ways. One way to answer that is that when I was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, I had this professor, Bill Cronon, who is a renown environmental historian/geographer. He had us write what he called a “place” paper, which was supposed to be a research history paper about a specific place. But I didn’t really have much interest in researching. So I just wrote about this property that my grandparents own in the Upper Peninsula, what it’s meant to me, and the his-tory that I know just through people telling me stories.

Cronon gave me wonderfully positive feedback. He stressed the importance of writing deeply about a place. That was one of the first writing lessons that I ever got.

And the other thing is, I really adore where I’m from. I find the landscape inspiring and I love the seasons. When I was writing this novel, I was a student at Iowa and I was really homesick and lonely and thinking about how my wife and I were some day going to get back to Eau Claire.

EM: Do you think it’s easier to write about a place when you have that physical or emotional distance from it?

NB: That’s a really good question. Let’s hope not. I worry about that sometimes because I am back in exactly the place that I want to write about and so I hope that it doesn’t become so every day that I’m not paying attention to things in the same way.

One thing that is nice is that I’ve been doing enough traveling that when I come back it’s fresh every time. I’ve written a few short stories since I’ve moved back here.

EM: I hear you have a short story collection that will be published in the summer of 2015, Chainsaw Soiree. I’ve read this title story and several others in various literary magazines. How does this collection differ in comparison to your novel?

NB: In a word, I think it’s darker. But similar in the sense that most of the stories are set in the Midwest and they deal with friendships and nature and relationships.

Have you ever read a book and, upon reading the last

page, wished you could call the author person-ally to tell him how much you enjoyed it? And then, question him about what he’s working on now and, maybe, ask about his life and what he’s reading?

Recently I got to do just that with Nickolas Butler, author of the book Shotgun Lovesongs.

In anticipation of his upcoming arrival in Harbor Springs this July, we spoke about books, life, work, music and our shared crush on actor and writer Sam Shepard.

Butler was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania and raised in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. He is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin and the esteemed Iowa Writers Workshop. This, his first novel, went to auction as publishing houses bid for the honor of publishing it. Fox Searchlight has optioned the movie rights to the book and a screenplay is already in the works. All this early success might make a monster of some. But Nick is as humble and generous as they come. It is my sincere hope you will read his novel and then join us for his visit on July 23 at Pond Hill Farm (the event, hosted by Between the Covers, includes a buffet dinner, reading, Q&A and signing).

EM: I know you visited Harbor Springs last October. We are excited that you are coming back for this big event in July.

NB: I so appreciate all that Katie (Capaldi, owner of Between the Covers) has done to promote the book and the excite-ment there.

EM: What was your first impression of our little town?

NB: The first thing that comes to mind is that I drove through literally every kind of weather possible on my way there. It was raining, and then it shifted into snow and then beauti-ful sunlight broke out. There was a brilliant rainbow. And then it couldn’t decide if it wanted to be cold or warm. And every town up there has an independent bookstore, which made me think, am I in heaven?

And then I go into [Between the Covers] and it was busy on a random Tuesday morning, which is so heartening. And everyone knows each other. It was wonderful.

EM: Sort of like the small town of Little Wing that you create in your novel Shotgun Lovesongs.

NB: Yeah.

EM: There is a section from your novel that sums up life in a small town so well.

“If there’s ever a draw back to living in a small town it’s that you can’t ever disappear from your neighbors. They know where to find you. And more often than not, they do find you. Because they need you, or your tools, or your truck. See, we depend on one another.”

Little Wing, the town you’ve created in your novel is so vivid and familiar to those who have lived in small towns. How does it shape your novel?

NB: Well, I wanted to examine this suite of problems or issues that my friends and I were encountering in our thirties, like why are some marriages successful and other marriages crumble, why is it so easy for somebody to make money and somebody else just can’t, why can one person get pregnant easily and another person struggles? I needed the intimacy of this place to act as a kind of gravitational pull for these characters, a place that these people are vested in, which leads them to take care of characters like Ronny while they come towards some sort of truth about these issues.

EM: This story is told through five different narrators, Henry, Lee, Ronny, Kip and Beth. Each character has a distinct voice and perspective in the telling of this story. Did you struggle with creating the voice of any one of these char-acters more than another?

NB: Yes. Definitely. Henry and Lee were easy to write. Initially, I worried about writing from Beth’s perspective but once I got into it, it wasn’t so hard. The one that gave me most pause was writing from Ronny’s perspective because I wanted to make sure he wasn’t too damaged but dam-

Celebrating Words, Literature, Authors, Libraries, Booksellers and Reading!

With special Harbor Light Newspaper LitChat Editor/Columnist Emily Meier, emilym@ncpublish.com

Between the Covers | 106 E. Main St., Harbor Springs | 231.526.6658 | books@btcbookshs.com

As part of our ongoing efforts to honor reading and writing, “LitChat” will be included in our newspaper on the first Wednesday of every month. Emily Meier, a writer and reader with deep connections to northern Michigan, is our LitChat editor.L i t C h a t Overheard

in the bookstore

Emily Meier and Wally

“This bookstore feels like it could be in a big city. It’s so cool. I love it!”

-Mia Roukema

Courtesy photo/Olive Juice Studios

aged enough that people could underestimate him. I took care with writing his sections, like the way he speaks; his vernacular is a little different because he’s spent more time out west. I had to listen for his voice when I reread a passage to make sure that it sounded right to me.

EM: Before I’d done any research on your background as a writer, it was sections of writing like--“He wrote songs about our place on earth: the everywhere fields of corn, the third-growth forests, the humpbacked hills and grooved-out draws. The knife-sharp cold, the too-short days, the snow, the snow, the snow.” --in your novel that made me know you were also a poet. There is a musicality to the lines and images. As a writer, which genre did you come to first? Poetry? Short stories?

NB: I wrote reviews and essays for my high school newspaper but then I just wrote poems. I wrote poems for ten years and I had some pretty good success. I just wasn’t as suc-cessful as I wanted to be. So I thought I would try and write fiction and I signed up for a workshop with my friend, the novelist Dean Bakopoulos, to give myself deadlines and some honest feedback. That gave me the confidence to move forward and try something new.

EM: There’s a poetic sound, an attention to the lines, which comes through in your novel.

NB: Thanks. After I completed the novel my agent and I passed it back and forth for a period of about four or five months—he’s an excellent reader of poetry and represents some pretty big names, Natasha Tretheway [current Poet Laureate of the United States] and Kevin Young. He was really instrumental in constantly reminding me about finding the rhythm in sentences; it’s not that hard to do but you have to spend time with each sentence and think about the ways that you can tweak the language to build that rhythm or music.

EM: That same passage also brings up the topic of place and it’s importance. How has your sense of place affected you as a writer?

EM: Are you writing more short stories right now? Or are you working on another idea for a novel? Maybe, writing poetry?

NB: The easiest way to answer this is let’s say my wife asked me to paint a room. A normal person would start on one wall and finish that wall and then move to the next wall and then go around the room in that manner.

Whereas, I paint part of one wall and then move to another wall and do a little there and then go to another wall and then four hours later my wife comes in and says, what have you been doing? Why isn’t this room finished? And that’s kind of like what the creative process in my head is like too.

I’m like la, la, la. Oh let’s do something else. I wish I had more of a laser focus. But instead I’m huffing on a poem here and working on a play over here and then working on a new novel.

EM: Has your writing process changed at all since the success of this novel?

NB: The answer to that is yes and no. This novel was written in a kind of frenzy because I was really concerned about graduating from Iowa and not having anything to show for it. So it was important for me to use that time, and the summer thereafter, to create something to show for my efforts.

I was living in Iowa, two, three, four, nights a week by myself, and really using that time to write. When I came home to be with my kids and my wife, I’d write at night as late as I could. I’m still a night owl. When I write it tends to be at night. That’s when the ideas start flowing for me.

One of the really cool parts about the wonderful things that have happened in the last two years is it’s given me the opportunity to have more creative space. Like, I’ve found Sam Shepard’s writing and I can’t tell you how important his writing has become to me in such a short time. The way he uses language almost seems effortless at times and there are some pretty amazing themes go-ing on behind it.

EM: Who are some of your other favorite writers?

NB: Important writers, for me, include Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, Rick Bass, Annie Proulx, Toni Morrison, Ken Ke-sey. There are just so many. I could keep going on and on.

EM: What are you reading these days?

NB: It tends to be a lot of newer stuff because people are asking me to look at their manuscripts but an older book that totally took me by surprise recently, unlike anything else that I would read normally, is Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan.

EM: Love that you mention this book as it has such a cult following.

NB: Yeah, and he was like the biggest deal in American letters for a while but now he’s not talked about in those circles. It’s such an odd book because it works artistically on a really original level. Beautiful language and the arrange-ment of words on the page is quite something. And then there’s this deep sincerity to what he’s doing too. I mean he’s not just writing this crazy book for crazy sake, there’s something happening there.

EM: Yes, writers are my rock stars.

NB: That’s nice of you to say. I think on the scale of American celebrity, we rank somewhere below failed figure skaters and maybe even behind semi-pro hockey players.

EM: Speaking of other professions, I have been told that you had some terrible jobs before having success as a writer. What was one of the worst?

NB: It’s hard to pinpoint what the worst job was. There’s some competition there.

I mean in one job I had a boss throw a suitcase at me. At another I had a gun pointed at me. I can’t make this stuff up.

At Oscar Mayer, my co-workers were wonderful and made the work tolerable but the day to day of being in-side that factory and knowing I was only a year and half removed from graduating with honors from Wisconsin, and now I’m working as a meat packer. That was really sad.

My co-workers would say, What the hell are you doing here Mr. College Education? And I was like, I don’t know.

EM: What was the best advice you received about writing?

NB: I think the best advice I received about writing came from one of my favorite professors at Iowa, James Alan

Shotgun LovesongsA conversation with author Nickolas Butler

In Memoriam: “I do not trust people who don’t love themselves and yet tell me, ‘I Love you.’ There is an African saying which is: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt.” “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but

rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”

Celebrated author, educator, poet and actress, Maya Angelou passed away last week. What a loss her death leaves in the world of words and good people. Here are two of my favorite quotes.

-Emily Meier

Nickolas Butler in Harbor SpringsJuly 23

Rapid Fire with Nickolas ButlerEM: Upper or Lower Peninsula?

NB: Upper

EM: Lake or River?

NB: That’s impossible

EM: Beach or Woods?

NB: Woods

EM: Kid Rock or Bob Seger?

NB: Bob Seger

EM: Aretha Franklin or Al Green?

NB: Al Green

EM: Jack White or Eminem?

NB: Jack White. Not even close.

EM: Ernest Hemingway or Jim Harrison?

NB: Jim Harrison

EM: Thomas McGuane or Elmore Leonard?

NB: McGuane

EM: Summer or Winter?

NB: Right now, I’m going with summer because I just suffered through eight months of winter.

EM: Hockey or Football?

NB: Football

EM: Fish or Hunt?

NB: Fish

EM: Beer or Liquor?

NB: Beer

EM: Hike or Bike?

NB: Hike

EM: Sailboat or Motorboat?

NB: Hmmm…Sailboat

EM: Sunrise or Sunset?

NB: Sunset

EM: Small town or Big city?

NB: Small town. Not even close.

McPherson. And it really wasn’t about writing. He just said, “Take care of your family, take care of your kids and your wife.” I think what was implicit behind those words was that even wonderful, well thought of books drift out of the zeitgeist with time. But your family is always there. It’s important to be a writer, we all care about books but life, life is bigger than just books too, you know?

EM: What does your wife think of the success you’ve had with this book, beginning with the manuscript going to auction and now, being made into a movie by Fox Searchlight?

NB: She really held our family together for those two years while I was at school, which was a huge leap of faith. Some partners would’ve just said, you can’t do that. We’ve been married nine years in September and we dated for a long time before that. When you’ve been together that long, you come to just expect certain things of each other. But there was a moment after the book went to auction when we went out to dinner to celebrate and she just looked at me like, you did it. Not like she didn’t believe I could, but like, wow you really did it. You pulled it off.

I agree with Nick’s wife, he really did it. He’s written a rich and relatable first novel whose characters will stay with you long after you read the last line. I look forward to welcoming him back to Harbor Springs this July and hope you will join us in what is going to be a fabulous evening filled with good people, great stories, and amazing food.

Editor’s Note: Emily Meier’s interview with author Nick Butler makes it easy to see why he’s already becoming a beloved American literary figure. We in-clude here a review of Butler’s debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, that Katie Capaldi wrote for March’s Between the Covers newsletter, to highlight how the writer’s personality and talent match up.

Shift your focus just one state across the lake to Wisconsin, and the setting for Shot-gun Lovesongs, by Nick Butler. Oh, here I go. I barely even have to call this novel to mind, and I can already feel the not-entirely-unpleasant ache in the gut where this story viscerally and firmly holds me, rocks me, soothes me. In that way, it is as much a love song in its own right. A love

song to the Heartland - to its unforgiving and knowable seasons; to its hills and dunes and

farmlands; to its Great Lakes, and to its small lakes, too. Even more than that, Nick Butler has created characters that let us in as readers, as fellow Mid-westerns, as fellow human beings.

He has made us fall in love with Henry's calm and steady reliability, and with his hands that capably work crops from his fields and milk from his cows just as much as they provide reassurance and comfort to his friends when they return to the town of Little Wing. We are in love with Henry's wife, Beth, too. Her lasting connections with all of the men in the book allow us a glimpse at a facet of each one that we might not see otherwise. We feel deeply for Ronny - his struggles, his broken dreams, his past glories, his frustrations and aspirations, as he navigates this middle adulthood in which most (even, and especially, his friends) view him as a child.

Butler works out of us some tangled emotions about Leland and Kip, as well. For all intents and purposes they are the antagonists, the prodigal sons, of the story. And really, even those descriptions are too harsh, as it all comes down to complexity and lay-ers and people's true, inner selves. Leland, the indie rocker who is the one-in-a-million that has made it big in the shifting world of musicians. And Kip, who had his heyday in Chicago's mercantile exchange, and returns to Little Wing as a master of the universe, to resurrect the prosperity that once was. Both of these men have seen great success. Coupled with that, and to maintain a cosmic balance, they have seen great failure as well.

Despite their differences, and because of their unde-niable similarities, all of the characters find their way home. And that is what it is all about for the reader, too. Butler turns a phrase and crafts an image that will make you lose your breath and that will stop your heart flat. The only way to get it beating again is to crack open your ribs, reach in, dig deep, and make the conscious effort to keep on going. To continue from one day to the next. To overcome that physical sensation when your body slows and yet your insides still pursue that established forward velocity. To stop. To be. To be present. To be here.

The getting there hurts, but once you arrive, home is the sweetest place you'll ever find.

By Katie Capaldi

Shotgun Lovesongs‘A lovesong to the Heartland’

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Between the Covers is hosting Nickolas Butler at Pond Hill Farm on Wednesday, July 23 at 7:30 p.m. The evening will include a farm-to-table buffet dinner, reading from Shotgun Lovesongs, question and answer session and signing. Cash bar available. $40 per person. Reserva-tions (non-refundable) are required and can be made in person at Between the Covers or by calling the store, (231) 526-6658.

Nickolas Butler

email Emily Meier at emilym@ncpublish.com