Maybe you've seen Lesley Choyce's essays in the Globe and Mail, heard one of his radio plays on Morningside, or caught his book-and-author show on Vision TV. Maybe your children read his novels for young adults, or watch his videos on MuchMusic.
He has a résumé as diverse as the books he writes: he is an author, publisher, teacher, TV host, surfer, musician, family man, and born-again Nova Scotia patriot. This fall will see three contrasting publications of his. Quarry Press is issuing a science-fiction-fantasy novel called Trap Door to Heaven. Formac Publishing has Falling through the Cracks, a young adult novel and from Penguin, there's a popular history book, Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea. For most writers, three titles in one season is unheard-of, but Lesley Choyce is the *Cal Ripken Jr. of the Canadian literary world.
Sitting in his English Department office at Dalhousie University, surrounded by books from his company Pottersfield Press and posters from the environmental causes he supports, Choyce talks about creativity and his resolve never to do what he calls "writing the same kind of book over and over again." True to his word, there's a book by him from a different publisher in nearly every section of the bookstore; he's written poetry, short stories, novels, science fiction, nonfiction, young adult novels, and autobiographical essays. Not bragging about his output, he says, "I don't think I'm a particularly good writer, but I keep at it." There have been forty-two books in almost as many years, and though some of his young adult novels are brief, his 1994 novel The Republic of Nothing was a hefty 364 pages.
If there is a constant theme in his work, it's his obsession with Nova Scotia. He is a Bluenose by faith, not birth. Of his move from New York in 1979, he wrote in his 1987 book An Avalanche of Ocean, "Arriving here as an immigrant, it felt like I was, in fact, returning home for the first time in a long while."
Home was first in southern New Jersey, where he was born in 1951 and grew up in rural Cinnaminson. During the middle sixties, the age of the Beach Boys, the teenaged Lesley wrote songs and played lead guitar in a surfing band called The Wipeouts. The Vietnam War meant the chance of being drafted, but his high lottery number allowed him to complete college and two graduate English degrees. While he considered doctoral studies and an academic career, Choyce was disheartened by what he saw happening in American society: pollution, noise, violence, stress, and what he now calls "the gluttony of progress".
Several visits to Nova Scotia convinced him that it was a safe, clean place to live. But in the late seventies, when he and his wife Terry declared their intention to emigrate, most of their friends and relations were astonished. He remembers that "Irving Howe, my academic adviser at CUNY, kept telling me, `Stay in harness for another year,' but I'm glad I didn't." The couple bought a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in Lawrencetown, thirty kilometres from Halifax. Choyce's ambition was to write and in 1979 his new publishing company Pottersfield Press published its first Pottersfield Portfolio. The next year, Fiddlehead Books released his first book of poems, Reinventing the Wheel.
Since that time, Nova Scotia's landscape, its people, and its history have dominated Lesley Choyce's imagination. It's as though a brisk offshore breeze were blowing through his creative consciousness, connecting him to that reality and manifesting itself in his work. He struggles to explain the grip that the region has on him: "My ganglia and my senses are all tied in with the land....There are certain images that burn themselves into your head." There's little sentimentalizing in his fiction, even in his poetry; in a land of rocky shores, harsh winters, and resilient people, Choyce's writing rejoices in the strength he sees around him. For instance, in his 1989 novel The Second Season of Jonas MacPherson, the central character is an aging fisherman who rages like a latter-day King Lear against civilization, time, and death. Ferociously independent, Jonas MacPherson clings to his bit of coastline, savagely defying fate to come and get him.
The book was well-received but Choyce did not have a real breakthrough until The Republic of Nothing. in 1994. Set on the fictitious Whalebone Island off the Nova Scotia coast, this sprawling coming-of-age novel deals with politics, Vietnam, anarchy, sex, and death. Good reviews and sales and a spot on Adrienne Clarkson's CBC show made the book and its author desirable properties. Choyce has sold the rights for a television movie with a script by John Frizzell, whose other credits include the film Life with Billy and the TV show The Rez.
But a tribute closer to the author's heart came from letters and phone calls he received from several people who on the strength of reading the book had moved to Nova Scotia to start new jobs and lives. One letter produced a new author for Pottersfield Press. Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for the rock band Rush, read the book and sent Choyce an appreciative letter in which he mentioned that he'd written a book about bicycling in Africa. Choyce read the manuscript and was delighted. "It was great, it was eccentric and unusual. I loved it." This fall, the drummer turned author makes his literary debut when Pottersfield issues Peart's book, Masked Rider.
Another of Choyce's parallel identities is as a successful young adult novelist. In his eleventh such book, Falling Through the Cracks, he writes about teenagers who have left home and are trying to work, stay in school, and survive without parental support. Carolyn MacGregor of Formac says that Lesley Choyce has a gift for creating story-lines that appeal to young readers. "He checks things out with the real world and it's always authentic," she says. MacGregor says that what she likes is the ability to take topical material-homeless kids, family breakups, racism, pollution-and weave it into a plot without preaching to his readers.
Whenever possible, Choyce is on the road visiting classrooms where he plays his guitar, reads from his books, and gives pep talks about surfing, writing, ambition, and life. "It helps that he's a great entertainer," says MacGregor. "Every time he travels somewhere, we get a batch of orders from that place." His popularity is backed by critical praise; he won the 1994 Ann Connor Brimer award, given yearly to an Atlantic author of children's literature and he was also a finalist for the 1994 Manitoba's Young Reader's Choice award.
Though he has two daughters, Choyce is careful not to borrow material from their lives. "The parent in me is separate from the YA novelist," he says, and admits, "My kids don't read my YA novels." He bases his young adult books in the familiar territory of Halifax-Dartmouth, using real schools, streets, and coffee shops. He likes the immediacy of writing in the first person and usually opts for a straightforward exposition of character and plot, keeping the action and dialogue snappy. So far it's working, he says. "Parents tell me of their child, `It's the first time he's read all the way through a book.'"
A bond between Choyce and his young readers is their common interest in music, particularly in homegrown alternative rock and garage bands. Since his days with The Wipeouts, he has played guitar, and with his band the Surf Poets, he has made a tape and several music videos. One video, "Beautiful Sadness", has appeared on MuchMusic. He says cheerfully, "I can't sing at all," but he recites the lyrics on top of a buzzy mixture of guitars, keyboard, and drums. Occasionally the Surf Poets perform live, as in June when they appeared in front of the main branch of Halifax City Library during a twenty-four-hour readathon, organized by writers and booksellers to protest the new tax on books. Another step towards respectability came with an invitation to play a gig at the Atlantic Jazz Festival in late July.
During a trip to Japan in April, Choyce talked to Japanese publishers about selling the rights for his own books and those of Pottersfield. He also spoke at schools and universities in Tokyo and was gratified to find that one university includes The Republic of Nothing in its North American literature course. Japanese media were intrigued by the notion of a surfer-writer, and Choyce talked at length to a reporter from Surfing Life magazine. "The interview was hardly about surfing, mostly he asked questions about life and philosophy," he reports. He also found that people were mesmerized by the geography of the Maritimes. While showing his music videos to groups, he remembers that "I would hear gasps in the room when they saw the landscape, the marshes, and the coastline. Later they said through the translator, it's not possible that you live in a place that beautiful." No plans are confirmed but Choyce says, "Now I know what they're interested in: a book about life in Nova Scotia. They're fascinated by us, they think we're exotic."
It's not the first time that surfing has brought Choyce useful publicity. Since learning to surf in New Jersey thirty years ago, he's been a devotee and now surfs year-round, wearing a wetsuit in winter. In 1993 he was the Canadian National Surfing Champ and though he's since gone to third place, he remains a keen participant. "There are mental disciplines I learned from surfing that apply elsewhere," he says. Some celebrity gloss carries over to Dalhousie, where he's taught for ten years. He is uncertain what colleagues think of his books, saying that nobody has offered an opinion. "I'm this interesting oddity....The university gets some spin out of it, the books and the surfing." He laughs about a recent national handbook for university students, in which he was described by one student as " a bitchin' surfer".
Between university terms, Choyce is writing his next book. Working three or four hours a day, he's twelve chapters along, preferring to chisel out large chunks of text and leave revisions until later. "I inherited a strong work ethic from my father, the truck mechanic," he says. "Writing never costs me anything. In fact, it gives me something." Part of that ease may come from his prose style; it's relaxed, informal, almost conversational. Of his frequent use of first-person narrative, he says, "I have more fun, genuine fun, in being there. In my own reading, most of the novels I really like are in the first person." That simplicity does not always sell to critics or departmental colleagues, but it's a quality the author values. In an essay called "The Perpetual Adolescent", he explains his theory: "One of my great fears is that by the time I become an accomplished writer I will have become `sophisticated': a calm, morbid and oh-so-subtle writer-the kind praised by academics and never read by the living."
With his new pop history of Nova Scotia, Choyce's goal was to produce a book that would be widely read. Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea is probably the most ambitious project he has undertaken. He hired researchers to help him plough through archival documents and describes his editorial approach as "history with an attitude". His offbeat sense of humour is often evident; the chapter about Alexander Graham Bell, Abraham Gesner, and other inventors is titled "Dreamers, Schemers, and Telephone Screamers", a sly reference to Joni Mitchell's song "Free Man in Paris".
His once naive enthusiasm for the region is now tempered by maturity and knowledge, as he traces history from the Micmacs through to modern events like the decline of the fishery and the Westray explosion. An anecdote in the introduction reveals how the book reconciles Choyce's practical and poetic sides. While cutting a new wall in his house, he found that his home was built with timbers scrounged from a shipwreck. He writes, "My house was once a ship. And with the original captain long dead, I'm the only one here to sail her into the twenty-first century, complete with the aid of satellite dish, on-line information networks, fax, modems, and call-waiting."
Ancient lumber, new technology; who but a science fiction writer dabbling in carpentry could have found the enlightenment in such a detail? Could life in academe at CUNY or elsewhere have provided him with such varied satisfactions? Doubtful, Choyce thinks, musing that "I would have felt I was forever fighting the system." Living within hollering distance of the ocean, he hasn't yet run out of words; like Jonas MacPherson, he's braced and invigorated by the forces of nature. Maybe it's the philosophy of the all-weather surfer; once you get used to it, the water here is just fine.

Virginia Beaton is a Halifax writer.