Like many kids, I started piano lessons when my hands were small. I played the recorder in middle school and then chose the flute when I got to high school. I was a shy introvert so I didn’t join the band – I practiced alone for hours a day.  In 1975 I left home right after high school for the big city of Toronto. My dream was to study music composition at the UofT. Unfortunately, I had neither the grades or the finances for college. So my first step was night school and flute lessons. I started lessons with Mara Goosman. I could see it would take a long time to earn tuition so after studying with her for 6 months, Mara offered me a flutemaking apprenticeship with her husband Jack. Little did I know it was the beginning of a lifelong career as a flutemaker & silversmith. 

Fifty years have gone by and I still clearly recall those early years above a bank at the corner of King and Spadina in Toronto. Just the two of us, both learning and building those first Goosman flutes. It was an amazing experience because what I didn’t know at the time was that Jack was teaching himself flutemaking after padding and making headjoint at Powell flutes in Boston before coming to Toronto. He was meticulous and clever and not only taught me small craft and manufacturing but also how to innovate whether method, parts, or tools.

After 3 year apprenticeship,. I left Toronto in ‘79 to work as a journeyman flutemaker with Powell Flutes in Boston. I worked there for 10 years honing my craft to a master flutemaker. In 1988, I returned to Toronto with my wife, Meredith, and our two kids. We started the John Lunn Flute Company together incorporating many original design and artistic ideas into our instruments and built Lunn flutes for the next 30 years.

Stepping back to my teens for a moment, while working with Jack Goosman, and concentrating on music theory in off hours, I started daydreaming fiction stories and imagined a science fiction novel that I decided I wanted to write down. I bought a pawn shop typewriter and tapped out 200 pages early every morning, made flutes until evening, then practiced the flute, piano, and music theory into the night.

I loved the imaginative freedom that writing gave me and wondered if I might like a future in writing. My mom, Janet Lunn, was an award winning Canadian children’s writer and Canada’s first established children’s book editor. She offered to mentor me. As well as an editor, she was a tough and fair critic and we worked together every day going over my stories. She stayed my life long writing mentor. During those years, I wrote a mystery novel under her tutelage, wrote a couple of movie scripts, a TV pilot, and my first published books – “The Aquanauts” and “The Mariner’s Curse” which was reprinted in Prague for school classrooms by the Czech publisher Albatros. My movie scripts weren’t quite so lucky as filmmaking is a multilayered collaborative industry. One got optioned but never reached production. The Foil stories I am writing now are a recent project.

Taking another trip back, this time to the mid 1990s, I took an interest in Chasing and Repoussé to enhance the detail on my art nouveau flutes. I bought the tools and pitch and over the following years studied under several masters including Valentin Yotkov, Henry Spencer, and Victoria Lansford. Expanding from just flutes, I created jewelry and wall art that I have continued to this day.

That sums up a 50 year multi-patterned career in the arts. You can view details of all aspects of my art, current and past, by clicking on the links in this narrative or from the pulldown menu at the top of the page. I’ll give a passing mention to creating stop motion animation, website design, video production & editing, and then running a local television station for 8 years.

It has been an amazing ride and it isn’t over yet. Join my journey as I share on Instagram and blogs. My past blogs include Grampy’s Little Acre (chronicling raising grandsons for several years) and Planckscale Blog (musings about quantum science fiction). I also have a John Lunn Flutes YouTube page with lots of interesting videos about flutemaking and chasing I have done.