Read Online Jeremy Stone by Lesley Choyce - Free Book Online Page A

entangled.
    Entangled?
    Before Jenson, there was someone else
    and he hurt me. He said he loved me
    but he didn’t. It was bad.
    And then Jenson.
    Yeah, Jenson.
    And now you are all I have.
    I’ll be there for you.
    But I need you to just
    Just what?
    Be my friend.
    (Yeah, I’d seen that one coming.)
    I’m good
    with that,
    I lied.
    Thank you.
    There was an awkward moment of silence
    Then
    someone was knocking at the door.
    Sorry folks, Fred said. I need my office back.
    Got another bucketful of rain.

Photo credit: Daniel Abriel

Interview with Lesley Choyce
    Where did the story of Jeremy Stone come from for you?
    I wanted to move away from prose for a bit and write a novel in verse form. I wanted it to be accessible yet experimental. I didn’t have a specific style in mind or a story but I knew it would concern how individual notions about reality shape the way we experience the world.
    I had worked with many Aboriginal students and writers and learned from them about alternate ways of perceiving the world we live in. I knew it would be a gamble on my part to write a novel about a young First Nations teen from a first person point of view. So I put off the challenge until, like so many of my characters, Jeremy Stone arrived one day and his voice was loud and clear. I knew that he was unique and unusual and would lead me into unfamiliar territory. That was just the challenge I wanted.
    To be honest, I had no idea where Jeremy or the story would take me and heading off into the unknown was exactly what I wanted. It was my own coming-of-age challenge as a writer to follow Jeremy Stone and allow him to send me off into the unknown.
    This is your first verse novel. How does using this form affect the way you approach telling a story?
    Once I found the voice, I knew the story would be told sparsely and visually. Every word would have to have an impact and the placement of those words would add texture and meaning. The placement of words dictates a kind of reading rhythm. I had to be aware of how the reader would see the words and how they would resonate inside the head.
    I think the form made me write more slowly and work with multiple and underlying meanings that don’t always present themselves in the faster clip of prose writing. I wanted there to be considerable symbolism but didn’t want it to be too heavy-handed. I often didn’t realize the emerging patterns of those symbols until I went back to rework the first draft.
    Do you think telling this story in verse gives it a more powerful impact than telling it in prose might have done?
    I think it presents bigger challenges for readers. My hope was the “poetry” here would not scare readers away. My goal was to weave a complex and challenging tale that would surprise and satisfy true literary readers. But I was also hoping the sparse nature of the text might lure readers who don’t like big thick novels but who could be led into the complex, intriguing, paradoxical world of Jeremy Stone’s reality.
    Jeremy learns a great deal from Old Man, and from the spirits of Jenson Hayes and Jimmy Falcon. The spirit world is very much a part of Jeremy’s life. What interested you in a character who is sensitive to such experiences?
    Ah, that is at the heart of the story. Most of us feel we are fairly certain as to what is “real” and what is “not real.” If we can see it and hear it, it must be real. We assume thoughts and fantasies are not real because they are just inside our minds. Yet we are fully shaped by our beliefs and many of those beliefs are not fully tangible to others. For Jeremy, things of the spirit world are as real as, or more real, than what goes on around him. That is his reality. It is what shapes him and makes him who he is.
    Buddhists (and others) would suggest that things on the physical plane of existence are just illusions. The only true reality is experienced when we die and are freed of our