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 involves 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 sixteen skunks took up residence beneath his 200-year-old farmhouse. 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, aired on three national networks. Also up for discussion are the subjects of fog, drumlins, lichen, baseball, class reunions, hair, the origin of the Surf Poets and the nature of the "drowned coast" that is a stone's throw from the author's back door.