Lesley Choyce

About me:

Lesley Choyce was born in New Jersey in 1951, moved to Canada in 1978 and became a Canadian citizen. He teaches part-time at Dalhousie University, runs Pottersfield Press and has written over 60 adult and young adult books. His YA novels concern things like skateboarding, surfing, racism, environmental issues, organ transplants, and rock bands.

Lesley Choyce.com

To read an excerpt from Driving Minnie's Piano, click here.


Lesley surfs year round in the North Atlantic and is considered the father of transcendental wood-splitting. He's worked as a rehab counsellor, a freight hauler, a corn farmer, a janitor, a journalist, a lead guitarist, a newspaper boy and a well-digger. He also hosts a nationally syndicated TV talk show in Halifax. He lives in a 200-year-old farm house on Lawrencetown Beach overlooking the ocean.

What people say about Lesley Choyce...
Choyce has a feeling for the young and dispossessed, for the terrible angst of adolescence and the rituals of rebellion. - THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Stunning originality and lyrical brilliance. - THE VANCOUVER SUN
He risks everything. - THE CALGARY HERALD
His body of work defies categorization. - MACLEANS
A national treasure. - OTTAWA CITIZEN.. Nova Scotia's answer to the Renaissance man. - PETER GZOWSKI, CBC RADIO
He looks just like Keith Richards. - VICKI GABEREAU, CBC RADIO
Who knows what he'll concoct next. - ST. JOHN EVENING TELEGRAM
Thoreau in our midst. - TORONTO STAR
Skip the scandal sheets and pick up Lesley Choyce - KINGSTON WHIG-STANDARD
Life enhancing, life celebrating. - QUILL AND QUIRE
Lesley Choyce has an avalanche of fans. - THE HALIFAX DAILY NEWS
There is a kind of Zen peacefulness to his cyclical interpretation of history. - THE EDMONTON JOURNAL
Controlled, fluid, wry and passionate, Choyce is the consummate professional. - HALIFAX DAILY NEWS
Like Stephen Leacock meets Shirley MacLaine. - THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Personal Notes
Favourite book when young: Journey to The Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Career : I avoided one. To busy myself, I write novels and autobiographical books, host a TV show, teach part time at a university, run a publishing company, surf, freelance TV and radio work, perform and record alternative music and raise spinach.
Pets: an old dog named Jodi, four pigeons, an Australian dove, a grackle and a blue jay. Used to have a goat and a telepathic raven as well as a one-winged seagull. No kidding.
Room: Overlooking the ocean on a hillside at Lawrencetown Beach
Spare time: surf, hike, play electric guitar with heavy distortion, imagine, travel, imagine some more.
As a kid: skinny, smart but not very cool, daydreamed a lot and made Tarzan swings, river rafts and tree forts.
My first book: publisher thought it wasn't all that good but I should be encouraged. Skinny little book of poetry called Reinventing the Wheel ten years in the making. Kinda immature but full of insight.
Ideas: everything and anything. What makes me happy, what makes me scared. Bang, an idea arrives in the middle of the night.
Influences: waves, Nova Scotia, trees, dragonflies, kids, skateboarders, dogs, eccentric people, Canada, ice, music, books and dragonflies.
How I work: I dont work, never have. Mostly I just have fun and make stuff up.
Something I don't really approve of: shoes.
Tips: Do it. Forget about money and live. Make up your own life as it goes along. Don't let television or anybody do it for you.
My favourite book (of mine): Republic of Nothing
Why? Why? Why be a Writer? I decided to be a writer with high hopes that it would allow me to avoid work. When writing turned out to be work as well as fun, I stuck with it anyway simply because it seemed too late to turn back. I stuck mostly to fiction where it seemed that the facts need not get in the way of the truth but then as time went on I found that some of the facts of my own life were more revealing that the fictional truths I create. This came as a surprise and a shock to me. As a kid, I had a fairly minute ego: no one with in earshot was ready to persuade me that my opinions and insights were of much value in the world I lived in. So later, when I grew into my skin as a writer, I pretended for a while that what I had to say really was of importance. After a while, I started believing in the myth and this convinced me to abandon fiction for a while and get autobiographical. Since my life story would be exceedingly boring, I was forced to edit my personal history ruthlessly until there was something left worth sharing. My first fragmented history of the self came out as AN AVALANCHE OF OCEAN and I almost thought that I was done with autobiography. What more could I possibly say once I'd written about winter surfing and transcendental wood splitting and getting strip searched for cod tongues in a Labrador airport? But then something happened to me that I can't quite explain. AVALANCHE had set off something in me a kind of manic, magical couple of years where I felt like I was living on the edge of some important breakthrough. It was a time of greater compressed euphoria and despair than I'd ever felt before. Stuff was happening to me, images of the past were flooding through the doors and I needed to get it all down. Some of it was funny, some of it was not. Dead writers were hovering over my shoulder saying, "Dig deep; follow it through. Don't let any of it go." And I didn't. So again, I have the audacity to say that these things that happened to me are worth your attention. Like Wordsworth, I am a man "pleased with my own volitions." Like Whitman I find myself saying to readers, "to you, endless announcements." As I write this, I am bumping into forty five and I need to share the discoveries of the last ten years. For me it was a time of great battles. I fought the construction of street lights in the wilderness, the tedium of organizations and the relentless, good intentioned blundering of government and science. In Transcendental Anarchy I celebrated the uncompromising passages of a mid thirties male, admitting I would never be an astronaut or a president and, instead finding satisfaction in building with wood, arguing a good cause or even undergoing a successful vasectomy. Write about what makes you feel the most uncomfortable, a voice in my head told me. So I tackled fear and my own male anger and my biggest failures. And even more dangerous, I tried writing about the most ordinary of things: a morning in Woolco, an unexceptional day, the thread of things that keeps a life together. Throughout it all, there is, I hope, a record of a search for love and meaning fraught with failure and recovery. Maybe I've developed a basic mistrust of the rational, logical conclusions. I've only had the briefest of glimpses beyond the surface but I've seen enough to know that sometimes facts are not enough. There are times to make the leap, to get metaphysical, and suppose that we all live larger lives than appearances would suggest. Radio, TV, Film and Video credits: An Island to Stand On. 5 part radio drama: national CBC show Morningside. (script writer) The Halifax Solution. Halifax: Pottersfield Productions. Documentary. (writer, performer) Choyce Words. Halifax: Channel Ten/ PBS Maine/ Vision TV. (writer, host of 300 shows) Off The Page. Halifax/Toronto: Vision TV; also airing on Book TV, Canadian Learning Television and ASN. (writer, co-producer, host for three seasons) The Skunk Whisperer. Half hour docudrama. Co-production of Pottersfield Productions. (script writer, co-director with Lulu Keating). Aired on CBC-TV, CTV, Animal Planet. Dead Surf Poet Society. Half Hour docudrama. Pottersfield Productions. (writer, director). Music videos: "Traction," "Long Lost Planet," "Beautiful Sadness," Twelve More Miles to Runaway Bay.

Awards:
Finalist for the Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Award, 1981.
First place in short fiction and the novel: Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Literary Awards.
Pierian Spring Editor's Award for poetry.
The Order of St. John Award of Merit.
Short-listed for The Stephen Leacock Medal, 1987.
The Dartmouth Book Award, 1990,1995; short-listed 1991, 1992, 1993.
Event magazine's Creative Nonfiction Competition, winner 1990.
Ann Connor Brimer Award for Children's Literature, 1994, 2003; short-listed 1992, 1993.
Manitoba's Young Reader's Choice Award, finalist, 1994.
Authors Award, Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters, co-winner, 1995.
Short-listed for the Hackmatack Award for childrens writing, 2000.
Short-listed for White Pine Award, 2004.
Finalist for Canadian Librarians Association Young Adult Award, 2005.
First Place: Canadian Surfing Championships, 1995.
Landmark East Literacy Award, 2000.
Poet Laureate for the Peter Gzowski Invitational Golf Tournament, 2000.
Best Writer of Halifax (Coast Magazine): 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005.
Biographical Reference Sources:
Canadian Who's Who. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, etc.
Contemporary Authors, Volume 130.
Chicago: Gale Research, 1989. Contemporary Authors, Volume 211.
Chicago: Thompson Gale, 2004. (feature biography).
Dictionary of International Biography.
Cambridge: International Bibliographic Centre, 1999.
International Authors and Writers Who's Who.
Cambridge: Int. Bibliographic Centre, 1996.
Something About Authors.
Chicago: Gale Research, 1997.
Who's Who in America.
Chicago: Marquis Publishing, 1985.
Who's Who of North American Poets.
Cornwall, Ont.: Vesta Publishing, 1987.
Who's Who in Canadian Literature.
Toronto: Reference Press, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, etc.
Who's Who in the World. Eight Ed.
Wilmette, Ill.: Marquis, 1993.
Who's Who in Entertainment. New Providence, NJ: Marquis, 1997.

Lesley Choyce can be booked for readings and presentations through the Writers Federation of Nova Scotia: e-mail them at talk@writers.ns.ca

Click here to sign up for Lesley's e-Newsletter.