Madison Lit Fest

“Winter in Wisconsin is the ideal time to avoid someone because our garments grow ever larger, ever thicker, and we go about the frozen world insulated beneath knit caps and mittens, our feet clad in mukluks or boots.” – Nickolas Butler, Shotgun Lovesongs
 

We are so excited to welcome back Nickolas Butler, a UW alum and author of bestselling novel Shotgun Lovesongs. Come help us welcome Nickolas back to campus and learn how growing up in Wisconsin helped shape his writing career. 

Shotgun Lovesongs is a story of coming to terms with community and success, family and failure, set in a small Wisconsin town caught in the firm grasp of Midwestern tradition and chilling winters. The debut novel of Nickolas Butler, the story is a sweet remembrance of his time spent growing up in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Butler, a graduate of the Univeristy of Wisconsin- Madison, brings to life the warm connections formed in rural Wisconsin towns when the temperatures drop and the nights grow longer.

With a life as restless as the characters portrayed in the novel, Butler has worked as a telemarketer and a coffee roaster, and nearly everything in-between. And while the author’s life is marked by a childhood spent with friends and family under the bright Midwestern sun, the relationships between his characters are as strong as a blast of a shotgun shell.

The novel is also influenced by Butler’s high school friendship with Justin Vernon, more popularly known as the frontman of indie band Bon Iver. The sing-songwriter provided inspiration for one of the five friends who alternatively narrate the story. As all of the friends either stay put or move on into the wider world, they still feel connected to a sense of home, and are either drawn back or repelled by it.

Butler gives readers a feel for what it means to grow up in a place lost in the woods and on the backburner of time: his story, Shotgun Lovesongs, tells us about what we imagine happens in all of the towns that we may simply shuttle past on rural highways. He shows us into his home in order to help us better understand our own.

A book signing will follow the presentation. Copies of Shotgun Lovesongs will be available for purchase from A Room of One's Own at the event.