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Odds and Ends


  • Favourite book when young: Journey to The Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne.


  • Favourite book now: unknown.


  • 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.


  • My family and pets: 2 kids (12 and 18); a dog and bunch of pigeons and a budgie. I used to have a goat and a telepathic raven as well as a one-winged seagull. No kidding.


  • Room where I write: Overlooking the ocean on a hillside at Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia.


  • What I do in my spare time: surf, hike, play electric guitar with heavy distortion, imagine, travel, imagine some more.


  • As a kid I was: skinny, smart but not very cool, daydreamed a lot and made Tarzan swings, river rafts and tree forts.


  • My first book: the publisher thought it wasn't all that good but I should be encouraged. It was a skinny little book of poetry called Reinventing the Wheel ten years in the making. Kind of immature but full of insight.


  • Where ideas come from: 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.


  • How I work: I don't work, never have. Mostly I just have fun and make stuff up.


  • Something I don't really approve of: shoes.


  • Advice: 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.

Lesley Choyce's works copyright © to the author.


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