Alumni Book Nook: Dr. Ted Leighton (Sc’75, DVM’79)

Dr. Frederick (Ted) Leighton (Sc’75, DVM’79), a University of Saskatchewan (USask) graduate and professor emeritus, has co-authored a book of memoir stories with his late father, Alexander Leighton (1908-2007). The book, People of Cove and Woodlot: Stories Across 100 Years of Memories, was released by Moose House Publications in March 2025. The book of memoir stories follows the release of Ted Leighton’s two novels, Knowers and Lovers and A Ring of Justice, in 2024 and 2022, respectively.

Since retiring as a veterinary pathologist and a USask professor, Leighton has focused on his writing career. Before becoming a professor at USask, Leighton was a student at the university, earning a certificate in biology in the College of Arts and Science in 1975 and a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine degree in 1979 at the Western College of Veterinary Medicine (WCVM). He then went on to earn his PhD in experimental pathology at Cornell University before becoming a faculty member in the WCVM’s Department of Veterinary Pathology, where he focused on teaching, diagnostic pathology, and wildlife disease research.

In 2021, Leighton was appointed as an officer of the Order of Canada—one of the country’s highest civilian honours. Also in 2021, he was included among 135 USask researchers on a Stanford University list that named the world’s most cited and top researchers within their disciplines. In addition to his WCVM roles, Leighton served as the former executive director and co-founder of the Canadian Wildlife Health Cooperative (CWHC, previously known as the Canadian Cooperative Wildlife Health Centre). He now writes and lives in the Leighton family home in Bear River, N.S.

The Green&White asked Leighton about his new book, People of Cove and Woodlot: Stories Across 100 Years of Memories, and what inspired him to write it.

Why did you want to tell the stories of real people and real events that took place from the 1920s to the 1970s in Digby County, Nova Scotia?

I discovered the stories written by my late father among various of his unpublished writing that came to me in 2021. They are delightful portraits of the people and events he had known and experienced in his teens and early 20s and that had affected his life and career forever afterward. They also are wonderful stories in themselves and are evocative of times and places and families still known and remembered across several generations. It was important to me to share these stories with the families of the people portrayed in them as well as with a more general readership.

You co-authored the book with your late father, Alexander Leighton. What was that process like?

My father had been dead for 14 years when I discovered these stories. So, ours was not a person-to-person collaboration. The written stories were in the form of advanced drafts and my first job was to polish them and make them fully accessible to a general reader. I also had to introduce my father to that reader and give him a voice in which to tell his own stories. I also wrote new stories in his voice, drawn from interview transcripts and videos that chronicled his life in these same early years and up to the 1950s. I then wrote several stories myself about people and events he and I had experienced together. Now in my 70s, I find that carefully considering who my father really had been, how he had lived, his hopes and ambitions from age 10 to 22, and what it might have been like to know him then, was a very powerful experience. I could ask no questions and therefore had to reflect and deduce what I could of the truth of his boyhood and early adult life.

What responses have you received from readers?

So far, readers have been uniformly enthusiastic about the book, often for different reasons. Some are most interested in history, others by the personalities portrayed, and others by the overall sweep of the Leighton family history that provides a line of continuity.

Did your education at USask play a role in researching and/or writing this book?

No, but during my career as a professor at USask the active presence of the humanities and social sciences kept me engaged with ways of seeing and understanding outside of the natural sciences, in which my primary work was grounded.

You previously wrote two novels. How was the experience of writing true memoir stories different from writing works of fiction?

Writing the novels and the memoir was similar in that they all required a core of narrative interesting to any reader. Thus, finding the right voices and points of view for each story or chapter, and providing both separations and linkages among story elements, were similar between memoir history and novel fiction. But the memoir must not depart from historical truth and thus demands rigour in this respect. Writing style and order and language can make memoir stories more or less interesting to read. Thus, the challenges of good writing apply to both fiction and history, but in one they are applied to things imagined and in the other they are applied to uncover the emotions and meaning of things remembered and not imagined.

What do you enjoy about writing?

I am new to writing fiction and memoirs. Such writing is very different from writing scientific research or expository essays about science and nature, which I did professionally for 35 years. My novels include many elements of my own life experience and family history, carved up and distributed among scenes and characters in very pleasing ways. I enjoy beginning with a notion of a story and half making, half watching it unfold on the page. The memoir stories similarly were very pleasing to work on, contemplating my family’s life, first as portrayed by my father and then, both more broadly and, also more personally, by myself.

Why would you recommend your book to USask alumni?

These memoir stories have a universal appeal and look back at the events and people who launched the authors, as young adults, into the rest of their lives.

What are five adjectives that you would use to describe your book?

Poignant, funny, historical, true, and universal.