Where to begin…

I guess it all started with music lessons. Like many kids, I got 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 shy and an introvert so I didn’t join the band – I practiced alone for hours every day. I wanted to learn music composition. With that in mind, I left home for Toronto right after high school in 1975 hoping to study at the University of Toronto. It was a pipe dream. I had neither the grades or the finances. So my first step was night school academics and private flute lessons, which I began with flutist Mara Goosman. Earning college tuition would take a long time so in 1976, Mara offered me a job to start an apprenticeship with her husband, flutemaker Jack Goosman. 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. Just the two of us, both learning and building those early Goosman flutes. It was an amazing experience. What I didn’t know at the time was that Jack was self taught 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 ways to solve problems and innovate ideas to make our flutes.

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

Stepping back to my teens for a moment while working with Jack Goosman and learning music theory in school on my own, I started daydreaming an epic science fiction novel in my mind that I decided I wanted to write down or else I’d forget it. 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 rather than music. My mom, offered to mentor me. This was no small thing as she was award winning Canadian children’s writer and book editor, Janet Lunn. She was also a tough critic and we worked every day for months going over my stories and then continued part time for many years after I moved away. During those years, I wrote a mystery novel under her tutelage, 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. Sadly, my mom passed away in 2017.

Taking another trip back, this time to the mid 1990s, while creating variations on my art nouveau flutes, I took an interest in the metal decorating techniques of Chasing and Repoussé to enhance the detail on my flutes. I bought the tools and over the following years studied under several masters including Valentin Yotkov, Henry Spencer, and Victoria Lansford. As I became more proficient, I expanded from flutemaking into 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 work, current and past, by clicking on the links in this narrative or from the pulldown menus at the top of this page. I’ll mention some other creative fields I dabbled in such as stop motion animation, website design, video production & editing, and running a local television station for several years.

It has been an amazing ride and it isn’t over yet. Join my journey as I share on Instagram and blog. My past blogs include Grampy’s Little Acre (chronicling raising grandsons) 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.