The Wood Between the Worlds: An Interview with Nicholas Kotar

Tell us a little about yourself.

Ah, the question that can easily lead to Russian-novel-length answers! I’ll embrace my laconic American side (maybe).

Both sides of my family come from Russia. One side emigrated with the White Army during the Russian civil war after the revolution, through China and Australia to, eventually, San Francisco. The other (my dad’s) is from West Belarus/East Poland, and emigrated after WWII. We lived “on suitcases” when I was a kid, waiting for the glorious return of the Holy Russian Tsar (and I’m only being a little bit facetious here). I spoke Russian before I spoke English, and so did my kids. I’ve been boiled in the cauldron of Russian history, stories, and culture, but I’m also fascinated by the American experiment.

I think my two sides have a lot to teach each other (when they’re not bickering in my head). My dad’s a priest and was one of the people present at the uncovering of the relics of St. John of San Francisco, but that’s a long story for a different day, perhaps. 

Now you live at Holy Trinity Monastery. How did you pull that off?

By long, torturous roads.

The short answer is that I had a life planned out for myself that suddenly became impossible. Every single door I had opened before me slammed shut. It was not a good time, if I’m honest. My dad, who never pressured me to consider the priesthood, had told me at one point, before everything in my life exploded, that I might consider seminary as an option at some point, for my own personal development. Well, it so happened that the seminary door was the only one that creaked open at that moment. So, I went, flirted with monasticism for about fifteen seconds, got married in my second year of seminary, and now I’m musical director for the seminary and monastery. It has a very rich ecclesiastical and musical tradition, and it’s an honor and joy to be part of that. 

You also spend a fair bit of time in Belarus. 

My wife is Belarussian, and our story is filled with the kind of weird coincidences and Providential “accidents” that people of faith grow to accept as a part of regular life. We committed to each other that we would spend frequent time back in Belarus, for the sake of our kids’ keeping the language, but also because it’s a healthy thing for people to stew in the soup of different cultures. Not to become too chauvinistic about whatever “your” way of being is.

Once you spend a few weeks in the company of Belarussians, your whole worldview changes. The nonsense many people spout in the media about… well, everything… just stops being important. For myself as a writer, this is like drinking water of life. To be in the company of people who live with completely different intentions and hopes than the average American. It’s an old, story-seeped culture, and the people are generous, kind, and joyful. I love going back there. 

How did you become interested in fantasy literature?

It started with Russian fairy tales, then being read to by my parents. I think the original 1989 BBC Narnia production also had something to do with it. The music of that wonderfully terrible series, with its six-foot-tall beavers and gloriously overacting White Witch. We loved Narnia so much that we wrote our own version of it with a group of friends. It was called The Golden Evergreen, involved a Stone Witch instead of a White Witch, and for some reason the Lion in that version was called “Seaze.” Four of us kids would regularly run outside and scream “Seaze” at the clouds, because the Lion would sometimes manifest in cloud formations…

Anyway. Eventually, I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and I was hooked. I started to read everything I could find that was similar. Lloyd Alexander, Ursula LeGuin, which got me into sci-fi as well, which I love almost as much as fantasy. So it was as a reader first, but it always had a writerly component to it. I wrote stories as soon as I could write a sentence. 

When did you start writing your own fiction?

I still remember sitting in the back of our two thousand-something Honda Odyssey traveling through the Western U.S. for weeks during summers, looking at the beauties of our country, but thinking about how they could be settings for wild space stories. We had an amazing opportunity to live on a horse ranch at 5,000 feet above sea level near Durango, Colorado, in the summers with an elderly family that offered a guest house to priest families in summers. We rode horses through the Rockies, climbed mountains as high as ten thousand feet, read a lot. I also wrote a lot during those summers, and the practice was useful. When I got to college, I started to seriously write—not just fooling around with story ideas. 

Who are your role models, your mentors—the people who formed you as a writer?

My parents, my grandparents, a few of my teachers at St John’s Academy in San Francisco. School was formative for me in ways few people get to experience. A small, tightly knit community of people committed to a rich experience of the Great Books. Even after I graduated, there used to be a community of people gathering at my parents’ house to read poetry, tell stories, write and share our own stories. There were a few people there who are true geniuses, and they always encouraged me, never made me feel like a child. I’m so grateful to them. 

Starting your own press is a gigantic undertaking. How did you settle on this path?

It’s a story. My wife was literally giving birth to our fourth child when I got a phone call from a priest who had been interested in working with me on educational and literary projects. He literally said, “If I could make your literary dreams come true, what would that look like?” I was a bit flabbergasted, especially since my wife was in mid-contraction during this phone call. I asked him to wait for a week, during which I thought about it in between bouts of soaking up the miracle of the new child in my life.

I’ve always wanted to help other authors get their work out, and I’ve always had a streak of the teacher in me. So, we came up with St Basil Writers’ Workshop. It was a natural next step to start developing a publishing arm for the workshop, so that’s how Wood Between Worlds Press came about.

I’m still figuring out exactly how it will work and what it is, since the publishing industry is in total chaos right now, in a major transitional moment during which it’s difficult to know what the new dominant model for publishing books will be.  But I’m excited by the idea of the Modernist poets not only reading poetry to each other, but also publishing each other collaboratively. Three hundred copies at a time. Then, suddenly, you’ve got a T.S. Eliot out in the world writing verse that will break your heart into a million pieces before putting it back together with the beauty of his language. I also love the Inklings model of collaborative storytelling. A mutual support society that sometimes also extended into the business of writing. It feels natural and right to me. 

How do you identify potential authors? 

For the record, we are not open to submissions. At this point, I seek out authors myself based either on previous books they’ve written or because I’ve collaborated with them on other projects.

Most of our books will be the work of students who finish the St Basil Writers’ Workshop, which is a year-long program taught by some of the best Orthodox writers out there (Paul Kingsnorth and Jonathan Pageau somehow agreed to be part of this!). The reason that we will focus on their writing is not that there is some kind of nepo baby thing going on, but that there’s a multiple-stage submission process that allows me to see not only raw talent, but also the ability to incorporate writing craft instruction from good teachers. Writers need to be both able to fight for their vision of a story, but also be willing to grow from the instruction of others.

It's a fiercely difficult tension to maintain, but those who do it well sometimes write stories that reach toward something transcendent. They give me that childish sense of wonder that I really want to feel with every new book I read. 

Are there any books you've published recently, or that you've got in the hopper?

I’m currently in a year-long writing mentorship studying with World Fantasy Award-winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch, writing short fiction in genres I never thought I would be writing, including thriller and crime. That has been a wonderful experience, training writing muscles I didn't know I had or needed.

I’m about to start a deep dive into a new fantasy series set a thousand years after my first Raven Son series. This is going to be the next big thing I’m doing, and it’s deeply enmeshed in the Russian fairy tales that I’m retelling regularly for Circe’s “In a Certain Land” podcast. I’m also writing sci-fi and space opera, and I have a few ideas I’m noodling with that will become novels in their own right. Something like “Three Musketeers in Space” with bits of Romanoff history in it. There’s a bit of a “Clone Wars” vibe to it, too (the best Star Wars property outside of the original and Andor, in my opinion). 

I’m starting a new phase in my writing and publishing business next year, with a lot more time dedicated to writing specifically, so it’s an exciting time! 

Dn. Nicholas Kotar is the author of In a Certain Kingdom, a collection of Russian fairy tales, as well as the groundbreaking fantasy novel The Song of the Sirin, among many others.

His translations include Ivan Ilyin's Foundations of Christian Culture and St. John of Tobolsk's The Sunflower.

To keep in touch with Dn. Nicholas, visit his website.

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