"A Land of Hope and Sunshine"

Piano Old Brewery Bay Orillia

"In the preface [Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town] Leacock made the patently false claim that he had not done 'anything so ridiculously easy as writing about a real place and real people.'  He could not have done otherwise.  He was mistakenly convinced that he had the power to create lifelike characters. At the same time he admitted that 'I have no notion as to how to make things happen.'  What he did have was an abundant ability to transfer the genuine article from life to the printed page in compressed form." 
~ Stephen Leacock A biography, David M. Legate, Doubleday Canada Limited, 1970.

In the preface of Sunshine Sketches Leacock claims that his imaginary little town of Mariposa is not a real town ~ that it is about seventy or eighty of them ~ that the inspiration of the book comes from "a land of hope and sunshine where little towns spread their square streets and their trim maple trees beside placid lakes."  However, it took people in Orillia, Ontario, a while to get over the perception that many of the characters were exaggerations of townsfolk they knew.

Dining Room Old Brewery Bay

" '...it was a fascinating business to watch them [the sketches] developing in the telling.'*  Typically, Leacock acted them with appropriate gestures, great gusto and evident self-appreciation.  Here was the raconteur in action.  Guests at the frequent dinner parties, over which Trix presided as a gracious hostess, remember how the host's chair was placed well back from the end of the table so that he could rise at any moment to walk up and down while making a point, as though he were in the classroom.
"In fact, this was the test to which he subjected most of his short bits and pieces.  He would read them aloud in his study or in the dining room to whatever audience he could assemble.  at Old Brewery Bay his favourite audience was his brother George, who was a well-known wit himself and the source of some of Stephen's material.  The two of them would go over the material, tossing ideas back and forth, laughing all the while, until Stephen felt that they had hit on the best possible form."

*editor B. K. Sandwell
~ David M. Legate, STEPHEN LEACOCK, A biography, 1970. Doubleday Canada Limited.

Kitchen Leacock's Summer Home, Orillia

"Many of my friends are under the impression that I write these humorous nothings in idle moments when the wearied brain is unable to perform the serious labours of the economist.  My own experience is exactly the other way.  The writing of solid, instructive stuff fortified by facts and figures is easy enough...
"...but to write something out of one's own mind, worth reading for its own sake, is an arduous contrivance only to be achieved in fortunate moments, few and far between."

Preface to Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, Stephen Leacock, McGill University, June, 1912.