Driving Minnie's Piano: Memoirs of a Surfing Life in Nova Scotia

Lesley Choyce

$19.95
ISBN-13 978-1-895900-85-9
ISBN-10 1-895900-85-9

Order this book from: Nimbus Publishing (or 1-800-Nimbus9)
or Amazon or Chapters or Pottersfield Press mail order.

[Cover of Driving Minnie's Piano: Memoirs of a Surfing Life in Nova Scotia]

Novelist Lesley Choyce weaves together his real-life adventures living by the sea at Lawrencetown Beach on Nova Scotia's Eastern Shore. He writes of his love for the rugged coast and tells tales of the ordinary and the extraordinary. His story includes accounts of what it's like surfing in the Canadian North Atlantic through all four seasons including the frigid depths of winter.

Also threading its way through this narrative is the story of Minnie's piano. There is music here in word and spirit along with the lessons learned from the old and the young. Driving Minnie's Piano is an eloquent personal memoir about the precious and fateful moments that change our lives. It is an exploration of what makes us tick and prompts us to be both heroes and fools in the daily enterprise of living.

Not one to take himself too seriously, Choyce recounts the true story of how his life was forever altered when 16 skunks took up residence beneath his 200-year-old farm house. This calamitous event and the deed of evicting the skunks (with the care of a die-hard environmentalist) is a hilarious chapter that was the basis for the film, The Skunk Whisperer, which aired on three national networks. Also up for discussion are the subjects of fog, drumlins, lichen, fools, baseball, class reunions, hair, the origin of the SurfPoets and the nature of the "drowned coast" that is a stone's throw from the author's back door.

Lesley Choyce recently edited Nova Scotia: A Traveller's Companion. He is the author of The Republic of Nothing and numerous other novels. Choyce also hosts the literary TV show, Off the Page. His popular history, Nova Scotia: Shaped by the Sea is published by Penguin.

Lesley Choyce is also the author of over fifty books, including, for Pottersfield Press: the novel Cold Clear Morning, the poetry collection The Coastline of Forgetting, children's books Far Enough Island and Famous At Last, and non-fiction books Nova Scotia: Shaped By The Sea and Peggy's Cove: The Amazing History of a Coastal Village. He has also edited for Pottersfield Press: Ark of Ice: Canadian Futurefictions, The Mi'kmaq Anthology, The Mi'kmaq Anthology, Volume Two (with Rita Joe), Nova Scotia: Visions of the Future, Nova Scotia: A Traveller's Companion, and Pottersfield Nation: East of Canada.


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