Saltwater Chronicles: Notes on Everything Under the Nova Scotia Sun

by Lesley Choyce

If Lesley Choyce was not a surfer, he would not have dropped out of graduate school in Manhattan in 1978 and moved to Nova Scotia—a decision that made all the difference.

Saltwater Chronicles follows the adventures of the ambitious, idealistic, and brash young man (still alive and kicking inside Choyce) while the older man ahead beckons him forward with a mischievous grin. In many ways, this book celebrates the ordinary: the everyday disasters and discoveries that shape a life. Along the way Choyce has adapted to the crisis of becoming a respectable citizen. He has experienced the death of his father and of his family dog. He has helped guide his wife through cancer as they rode the North Atlantic waves and recorded a most human range of sorrows and joys.

In this, his one hundredth book, Lesley Choyce takes readers along as he writes about nearly everything under the sun from his home by the sea on the North Atlantic coast of Canada—all of it most ordinary and yet extraordinary at the same time.

Genres: Nonfiction

184 pages, Paperback

Published April 30, 2020

About the author

Lesley Choyce is a novelist and poet living at Lawrencetown Beach, Nova Scotia. He is the author of more than 80 books for adults, teens and children. He teaches in the English Department and Transition Year Program at Dalhousie University. He is a year-round surfer and founding member of the 1990s spoken word rock band, The SurfPoets. Choyce also runs Pottersfield Press, a small literary publishing house and hosted the national TV show, Off The Page, for many years. His books have been translated into Spanish, French, German and Danish and he has been awarded the Dartmouth Book Award and the Ann Connor Brimer Award.

Lesley Choyce was born in New Jersey in 1951 and moved to Canada in 1978 and became a citizen.

His YA novels concern things like skateboarding, surfing, racism, environmental issues, organ transplants, and rock bands.

Reviews

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Through these short stories, the author does a great job describing living and aging on the Eastern Shore. It truly felt like home!

[Ian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lesley Choyce has been a mainstay on the Atlantic Canadian literary scene for decades. The author of 100 books, he has written and published in every genre imaginable. He has won and been shortlisted for numerous regional and national literary awards, operates a publishing house, held teaching positions at Dalhousie University and other institutions, and worked as a television presenter. He is an environmentalist, a humanitarian, a surfer, a husband and father, and a tireless advocate for Atlantic Canadian writing and writers. Though a Canadian citizen since 1983, he is American born, having emigrated to Canada in his late twenties and adopted Nova Scotia as his home. These details are relevant when considering Saltwater Chronicles: Notes on Everything Under the Nova Scotia Sun, which collects newspaper columns he wrote over the period from 2014-2017. Lesley Choyce candidly and unapologetically mines his own life experience for material, and the stories he tells in these pieces are, without exception, entertaining, instructive, poignant and filled with wry observations and self-deprecating humour. Family life, home improvement, government incompetence, surfing, chopping wood, drilling wells, struggles with illness and physical decline, are all up for discussion. The word “chronicles” from the book’s title hints at a preoccupation with the passage of time, and a theme that he returns to again and again is aging. A New Jersey native, born in 1951, Lesley arrived in Nova Scotia in 1978: an educated, inquisitive, idealistic young man with long hair and few possessions looking to escape the clamorous pressure-cooker of life in urban USA. Those days might be long gone, but Lesley retains that idealism, that love of and respect for nature, and the wide-eyed faith in the essential goodness of humanity that spurred him on his quest more than 40 years ago and sustained him through good times and bad. In Saltwater Chronicles he talks freely about the past but does so without regret. For sure, some of the articles strike a nostalgic note, but Lesley is accepting: he does not obsess over lost opportunities and he never complains about getting old. The most vivid and deeply affecting writing in the book concerns family: the death of his father, his wife’s bout with cancer. These episodes provide glimpses into the man’s heart and soul, and what we see is someone who is generous, loving and kind, and whose greatest wish is to leave the world a better place. We are fortunate and should be thankful that in 1978 Lesley Choyce chose to make Nova Scotia his home. Everyone who knows him, or been influenced by or learned from him, would agree that his abiding good humour, optimism and compassion have made Nova Scotia a better place to live, work and write.

[Leigh Swain Tilman · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a lovely collection of essays about the author’s life in Nova Scotia. It’s a light, pleasant read full of gentle good humor.

[Paula Dembeck · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is another book from Lesley Choyce, a prolific writer from Lawrencetown Nova Scotia, who has compiled several columns he wrote for the Chronicle Herald from 2014 to 2017 on a variety of subjects and added a few new ones to the collection. He covers everything you can think of, from his love of gardening, to buying a new dog (as opposed to adopting one for free), to potholes and the many used cars he has bought over the years (the colors lime green and pink appear more than once!). There are also more serious pieces on helping the woman in his life manage treatment for lymphoma and on the death of his father. He revisits several subjects he has written about before, his love of Nova Scotia, the place where he finally found the peace and the life style he was seeking as an immigrant from the United States, his passion for surfing, the adventures he has had hiking in the bush and purposefully getting lost and the enjoyment of his simple life close to the sea.

In among the chapters that are simply fun, are nuggets of his beliefs about love, life and his work as a writer. He uses plain, straight forward language and a casual tone making the book feel like a series of spontaneous fireside chats.

I have read much of Choyce’s work and would even describe myself as a fan. I admire the long journey he has traveled in life, not only geographically, but mentally and emotionally. He started off as a rebellious resentful hippie, but as he grew older, he became less angry, less self righteous and found his niche as a gifted writer, respected teacher, kind neighbour and proud Canadian.

My favourite pieces include the one he did on how reading shaped his life and opened the door for him to become a respected writer and a teacher; the one on napping an activity he believes would solve a lot of the world’s problems if more people took them and another on how he avoided the advice of his school counsellor to become a coal miner or a heavy equipment operator. In that group is also the one on place names in Nova Scotia in which he describes tracking down places with cryptic names like Bad Neighbour Shoal near Bridgewater, Hypocrite Brook near the Medway River and Chicken Rocks in the Bedford Basin. He is still looking for a place called Nancy’s Cellar located somewhere in the middle of the province and asks for readers help with that one. But the best piece was on the death of his ninety-three-year-old father, a man who grew up in poverty but never felt deprived of anything. Choyce writes lovingly of the man who always accepted his son as a restless hitch-hiking hippie, was never harsh to judge and always there when his sons needed him. He realizes how many things his father taught him including patience and persistence; compassion and optimism; to be fair and understanding; not to expect too much from the world, but to work hard and accept whatever rewards it gave back. His father wanted to die in the home he had built. And so he did, in the arms of his two sons.

Although in his early seventies, Choyce still looks like a much younger man. All that surfing, raw kale, hiking and his positive attitude to life have served him well. He doesn’t even have much grey hair in that healthy crop of curls on his head!

The entire collection carries a tone of longing. Like many getting older and looking back, Choyce feels some grief that a good part of his life is well behind him now and wants to live those years over again and again. His two daughters are now grown and he has a young grandson. He hopes they too will find a way to escape the heavily populated technical and artificial world we live in and do what he did, find a place away from the crowds and the madness to be alone and have time to reflect, ponder and meditate.

This is a book you can pick up and put down at your leisure with the short chapters that make that type of reading easy and enjoyable. The contents are more meaningful if you know something of Lesley’s Choyce’s life journey, at least I have found that to be so.

In closing, Choyce sends a final shout out to Jimmy Buffet, just to say how much he enjoyed the day they surfed together at Lawrencetown Beach, but pleads with Jimmy to return his wetsuit boots, they were his favourite and he wants them back!

[Linda Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed every chapter of this book. Lesley Choyce's natural, conversational writing style makes for a pleasing read. Gentle humour provides a chuckle here and there, but there were a couple of belly laughs, as well, including one involving a Tokyo incident with food. He makes the simple life, and making do with second-hand, sound cool as he only buys used cars because, after all, he straps his surfboard to them for trips to catch the waves. The biggest take-away for this reader is that Lesley Choyce is a really nice guy. When it comes to showing, not telling, he shows us, through his interactions with with people and animals, his decent and caring heart.

[Mary Archibald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every chapter: a gem.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny, light, meaningful

[Edwina · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quiet book, softly spoken, lovely stories. Like having a chat over coffee.

[Cathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very entertaining read. The author’s choice of phrasing captures the reader’s imagination, placing you in the author’s space and time. I loved it.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

An enjoyable light read. A short book with short chapters. I learned a little about the author. Some of the chapters were particularly entertaining, particularly the one on east coast gardening.