I would like to welcome you to episode 24 of the Symbolic World podcast. On this episode, I will be playing for you a discussion that I had with Nicholas Kotar.

Nicholas Kotar is a fantasy author who writes stories that take a lot of its sources from Russian fair tales and from ancient stories.

And so he's a very interesting person.

We talk about token, we talk about stories, and how they fit in the world today. And so, enjoy.

This is Jonathan Peugeot. Welcome to the symbolic world.

I am here with Nicholas Kotar. I hope I'm saying that right.

Nicholas is an author. He's a deacon in the Orthodox Church, but he's also an author of fantasy fiction.

He's written articles for the Orthodox Art Journal, and I'm sure he's also a translator, and he's a smart guy.

And I met him as he wrote an article

for the Orthodox Arts Journal about the lives of the saints and the way that he approached

the lives of the saints through a different vision really excited me because it connected with

the way I see storytelling as, let's say, as a structure around which reality kind of manifests

itself.

And he's also written some articles connecting the lives of the Saints to Tokeans' work.

And so a lot of interesting things to talk about.

And so maybe, Nicholas, you can introduce yourself a little bit and maybe talk just briefly

about the work that you're doing and the novels that you're writing and then we'll go on with the interview. Okay. Well,

the novels I'm writing come out of a very long period of thinking about the need for storytelling

in the modern world and what that storytelling should look like.

And it also comes from my own deep desire to tell the kinds of stories that Tolkien told

because they've resonated with me and with so many people throughout these these deads decades

on a very, very profound level.

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