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.