Free Jeremy Stone by Lesley Choyce

awareness from an early age. Even though he doesn’t fit well into the white world of school and community, he has this extra body of belief and knowledge that helps him survive the everyday difficulties of that world.
    He is by nature compassionate and his spirit is kind. He may use angry language, as all kids do when growing up, but his actions are not malevolent or unkind.
    Jeremy is also not afraid to be himself. He knows he is different and accepts that as an important part of his identity, so he knows what it’s like for others who are different too, especially Caitlan. It also seems that he’s been treated very much like an equal, as an adult, by both of his parents, since he was quite young. That, too, has given him an inner strength and greater compassion than the average young man.
    You like to tell stories in which not every problem is resolved at the end. Yet some readers like to know that a story is completed in the final page. What do you have to say to those readers?
    If I’ve done my job, a character like Jeremy will seem very real to the reader; maybe just as real as he seems to me. So I like to leave the illusion that life goes on for Jeremy after the last page of the book. And maybe it does on some other level of reality. Usually, there are no tidy endings to the chapters of our own lives. We solve one darn thing only to realize we are up to our eyeballs in the next messy, complicated problem. As the book ends, Jeremy has begun to move on to the next challenging phase of his life and so the story continues on some alternate plane of existence.
    You are a person with many diverse interests. You are a singer, a surfer, a poet, a publisher, a teacher, a storyteller. How do all those parts of your life contribute to the stories you choose to tell?
    From writing songs, I learned about using words as sounds instead of just visual representations on a page. And I started out my writing career as a poet. My first book was a little volume of poetry called Re-inventing the Wheel . I have continued to write poetry as well as novels and, in 2013, published I’m Alive. I Believe in Everything , a volume of new and selected poetry written over a forty year period. I have always believed in poetry and loved the possibilities of breaking free of the rules and limitations of standard paragraphs and sentences.
    I’m not sure how surfing influences me as a writer, but maybe it goes something like this. Surfing is the art of tapping into those invisible energies travelling through deep waters and matching your energy to theirs as they manifest themselves near the shorelines of continents. It has taught me that when you get smashed by those powerful forces of nature, you take the punishment, surface, get back on your board, paddle out, and try again. Writing novels is often like that.
    As a publisher, I worked with Mi’kmaq elder Rita Joe when she was alive to create the first Mi’kmaq Anthology , and I admired her quiet, deep, and compassionate spirit. She sent me on a couple of spirit quests including a search for a nearly-lost petroglyph in Bedford, Nova Scotia. I’d like to think her spirit was gently guiding me (or Jeremy) in the creation of this book. I also worked with a number of other gifted Mi’kmaq writers for a second anthology published in 2011.
    Certainly as a teacher, I learned many things from my students that went into this book. I teach in the Transition Year Program at Dalhousie University, a program for Black and Aboriginal students. Many of my Mi’kmaq students shared experiences, ideas and beliefs from their culture and traditions. So I was a good listener and I learned a lot. (However, if fall rolls around and I discover I have a student named Jeremy Stone on my class roster, I may be a bit freaked out.)
    And finally, as a storyteller, I just know I’d be lost if I had to live only in the so-called real world all the time. I don’t exactly