Welcome to Cantastic Authorpalooza, featuring posts by and about great Canadian children’s book creators! Today’s guest: Jean Mills. Take it away, Jean!

Like most authors, I use the world around me – especially my own world of experience – to create stories for young readers. So it’s not hard to identify the spark that ignited my latest Middle Grade novel, After the Wallpaper Music.

It was my Grade Four recorder group.

Yes, recorder. Sometimes known as the “torture stick”, often ridiculed as an annoying piece of plastic that kids use to torment adult ears. This little instrument changed my life.

We didn’t have any musical instruments in my childhood home, not because they were banned or anything nefarious, but because there were too many other necessities that took priority. I was already a kid with a gift for music, so school provided all my musical experiences, and that worked great. Choirs, school concerts, occasional visiting musicians. Until the recorder!

My Grade Four teacher was a musician, a member of a professional choir, and she was determined to elevate our classroom recorder program. After the prescribed curriculum was done, she rounded up nine of us musically-inclined students and created an extra-curricular ensemble named (not very creatively) The Recorder Group. We split into sopranos, altos and tenors and we learned complicated multi-part compositions from Baroque and Classical repertoire.

My recorder taking a break at the tune session! Credit: Jean Mills

We won ribbons at festivals and played Christmas concerts at Toronto churches. As we progressed through elementary and into middle school we shrunk and became a trio, but the concerts continued. I remember playing a Baroque concerto to a full classroom of music students at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo and hearing the professor say to our teacher, “Some of my students haven’t even heard of Frescobaldi!”

And on one incredible, memorable night, we collaborated with a group of older students from another school and walked on stage at Massey Hall in Toronto to perform in a post-Kiwanis Festival gala concert. I was the one playing the challenging and unwieldy bass recorder, and I was in heaven.

Many musical adventures followed. Piano lessons (finally!), viola in the school orchestra, teaching myself guitar and mountain dulcimer. Performing, teaching, composing. So many special moments and special people.

And it all started with my little recorder.

Flora Parsons, the musical girl in After the Wallpaper Music, is probably me. She plays violin (not recorder) at school and in an ensemble. But her violin does more than that. It becomes a fiddle when she plays traditional Newfoundland tunes for Auntie Flora. It becomes an electric guitar when she plays rock riffs with Simon. Just like my recorder becomes a whistle when I sit down for a Sunday afternoon tune session with my traditional music friends at a pub in Cambridge.

As any musician knows, music has the power to connect, teach and even heal us. Musical magic. I love to imagine where Flora’s musical path will take her…

And what is “wallpaper music”? Something I’ve played many, many times on a variety of instruments. Just another slice of my musical life that made its way into this story!

Singing and playing recorder with my band Greenwood at The Registry Theatre in Kitchener, Ontario