The waves were breaking high, fast and cold along the Eastern Shore on Tuesday. And, so, Lesley Choyce, our surfer poet, donned his winter wet suit, tossed his three-metre long, tri-finned Kevin Julien board into his car at his home in East Lawrencetown and lit out for the beach.
Some winter mornings, even after 40 years surfing those waters, he approaches the Atlantic Ocean wearily as well as warily. “But,” he told me, “my mood usually changes by the time I’m on my board paddling out.”
Tuesday, Choyce didn’t stay out in the strong rip current for long.
Christmas, despite the pandemic, is turning out to be a hectic time for his publishing house, Pottersfield Press, which this year released 16 titles.
Then, there is the new book he is writing, the title of which Choyce can’t actually remember until he goes digging through what sounds over the phone like a pile of papers for the title page.
I am willing to cut him some slack for this simple reason: his next book, Stretching my Mind: Travels Near and Far, will be his — and your eyes are not deceiving you —101st written work.
When I asked Tuesday how a person manages such a feat, Choyce, who is 69, but sounds no different than when I interviewed him 26 years ago, paused for a second.
“You sit down at the table, you put your ass in the chair and pull words out of your head,” he said. “Then you practise, practise, practise.”
Since finishing his first book, a collection of poetry published in 1980, Choyce has written poems, and novels for adults and young adults. He has penned essays, creative non-fiction, history and semi-biographical works, including Saltwater Chronicles: Notes on Everything Under the Atlantic Sun, his latest and 100th book, which hit the bookstores last summer.
According to Choyce’s back-of-the-envelope calculations, well over five million of his words have appeared inside book jackets. His works have been translated into many foreign languages and have won a slew of awards including the Dartmouth Book Award and the Ann Connor Brimer Award.
“I just go with the flow or the flaw, as it is sometimes.”
Lesley Choyce
In other words, all the practise shows.
“I’ve slowly found my voice, which has been gradually developing over the years,” he said, adding that “publishers now give me a lot more freedom to do what I’m doing.”
What he does and how he does it hasn’t really changed from when Choyce moved to Nova Scotia for good in 1978, a New Jersey-born PhD program dropout from City University of New York, who was first drawn here by the surfing.
He still likes to write in the morning, which is when he works best. Although Choyce has moved on from the manual and then electric typewriters on which he wrote his early prose books — he prefers to write his poems by hand on recycled paper — he still types away on a “nothing fancy” Acer desktop, using a Windows 7 operating system.
He isn’t one of those writers who doesn’t get up from the desk until they’ve hit a word count target.
“I just go with the flow or the flaw, as it is sometimes,” he said.
Now, which has always been the case, some of his best work takes place far from the keyboard, hiking in the Nova Scotian woods, or paddling his surfboard out towards some break.
“It is probably my most productive time because my mind can wander, the world can’t catch up with me, and I’m not even consciously thinking about the book,” he said.
Choyce is no dour workaholic: he’s a good enough surfer to have won the Canadian National Surfing championship in 1983 on his home Lawrencetown Beach with a manouevre known as the “floater.”
He likes connecting with his creative writing students at Dalhousie University.
His old band, Lesley Choyce and the Surf Poets, seemed to be getting back together before COVID hit.
Lately, he has been doing audio recordings of some of his poems to which Surf Poet alumni and friend Doug Barron has been adding musical layers.
Nothing, though, gets in the way of the books, the 100th of which demonstrates Choyce’s diversity as a writer, ranging in subject matter as it does from his father’s death to the time Jimmy Buffett made off with his wet suit. (Just buy the book.)
“It is hard work, but the magic really does happen. I truly forget where I am, and who I am,” he said. “All that matters is that thing that is happening inside your mind that you are trying to capture.”
It is just as Choyce said: you sit down at the table, you put your ass in the chair, then you just pull words out of your head.
