Introduction to Nickolas Butler

I recently worked with Nickolas Butler here in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His literary focus remains the same, explorations of the human quest for meaning and value. In this story, Lyle, the primary character, loses his settled job and his settled place within a community. Searching for a deeper, more meaningful sense of self, he falls back on Nature and its place in the human sense of self. Butler provides his readers with the timeless dimensions of this quest. “Apples” is a much-needed addition to contemporary fiction in that it explores beyond the conventional repositories of “self ”—job security, family bonds, for example—and reintroduces us to the settled world of nature, where we can explore into both new and ancient meanings of the term.