By Cecilia Nasmith

The favourable reception Trent Hills author Christopher Cameron received on his memoirs of 33 years with the Canadian Opera Company encouraged him to try a second book – but one that came from another direction.

Cameron recalled in a recent interview that he wrote Dr. Bartolo's Umbrella and Other Tales From My Surprising Operatic Life in a distinctly humourous vein.

“People told me the strongest part of my writing was my humour,” he said.

He remembered those comments as he undertook an altogether agreeable move out of the big city five years ago to Meyer's Island, just south of Campbellford.

“As soon as I got here, I felt like I'd been here all my life – a wonderful feeling. I never looked back,” he declared.

He arrived with what he called “a bunch of stories floating around in my head.” Feeling that they would work well in a rural theme, and inspired by Stephen Leacock, the result is Thorneside Stories: A Mix of Sun and Cloud, published by Iguana Books in Toronto. It will be given a gala launch Sept. 8 at the Art Gallery of Northumberland.

Cameron began the book with “a bunch of vaguely linked short stories with a small-town backdrop. Then they became more and more linked, until it became more and more like a novel.”

Recalling Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Cameron described his new book as “Stephen Leacock meets Lady Chatterley” in a series of closely linked humourous tales about life, love and music in a small Ontario town.

Terry Fallis – well-known Canadian author, two-time Leacock Medal for Humour winner and Cameron's humour-writing teacher at the University of Toronto – praised the book's “brilliant storytelling,” mentioning its “humour and heart and pitch-perfect prose.”

Its stories, Fallis predicted, “will leave you uplifted, inspired and perhaps inclined to move to a small town on a river to join the local choir.”

As editor of Watershed magazine, Cameron appreciates the opportunity to work with one of their regular columnists, Dan Needles, who has his own history of rural humour.

“I am a great fan of Canadian humour and Canadian humour writers,” he said.

“I have no illusions at all I am close to any of those guys, but they are my model.”

That choir Fallis mentioned is the Anglican Church choir in Thorneside that is the setting for Cameron's first couple of stories, no doubt influenced by memories of his own years singing in a church choir as a youth.

“I wrote an essay for the Northumberland Festival of the Arts website about reality versus fiction, and how almost all fiction has its genesis in a dose of reality. I'm not sure how much there is of me in it, but there is a lot of people I know.

“That said, there is some of me in each character I write,” he said.

“I look at the stories as very fictional. We watch and we listen, and then we compose from what we have heard and seen, and I think that any fiction writer would tell you the same.

“I'm a part-time English student at Trent University in my old age, and I came across an essay by the writer Margaret Drabble. She said all fiction writers are thieves and magpies, stealing things from everywhere and using them in our fiction.

“I think there's a little bit of the author in every character in a novel, and there's a lot of people in every character – no one character is ever a whole person transplanted into a book, or almost never, but there are little bits of people. Someone will say something, I remember it and, from that, a story might grow or a character might grow. One little thing out there sparkling, and it gives you a character.”

And it's the characters, he stated, which drive the plot.

Cameron is in close touch with Northumberland's literary and artistic community through a variety of hats he wears. In addition to the editor's cap at Watershed, he is also co-host and sound editor of an arts program on Northumberland 89.7 FM called Word on the Hills for the past three years.

“It's the most wonderful way to get to know the writers in Northumberland,” he said.

His location near Campbellford also puts him in close contact with two former colleagues from his opera days, Brian Finley and Donna Bennett – founders of Westben Centre for Connection and Creativity Through Music. He has been involved in productions there, the next one of which is a collaboration with Angela Roest of Centre & Main Chocolate Co. in Warkworth called Chocolate Voices, Sept. 11.

And your chance to get to know more about the stories and scandals of Thorneside is available on-line from such major book sellers as Chapters, Indigo, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, as well as such small independent sellers as Lighthouse Books in Brighton and Let's Talk Books in Cobourg.