Plenty of talented folks in Squamish write books, but that isn't how Carol A. Grolman plays things.
She has written a children's book, sure, but she also paired it with a song, and a video, and hopefully, one day, a live performance with friends.
Grolman's self-published Mouzart, named after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, of course, follows a musical mouse who gets caught in her piano and plays in the night.
The story is based on a real-life happening in the home of the local musician.
About seven years ago, a mouse snuck into her grand piano, though it took some figuring out to realize the sound coming from the instrument was caused by said mouse.
Grolman got up early one morning and was sitting with a cup of tea when the piano started. "I went, 'Oh, that is weird,'" she said.
Her first thought was that recently moving the piano across the room might have dislodged the keys or something.
At the time, she also had bed and breakfast guests from France staying downstairs.
"They came upstairs for breakfast and said, 'Were you playing in the middle of the night?'"
The guests drew the conclusion the house had a ghost or spirit.
Of course, Grolman and her husband Wilf soon discovered that a mouse had been visiting the piano.
The mouse was soon shown the door.
"Wilf said, 'I think we should call him Mouzart.' I went, 'Oh my gosh, there's a song in there."
So, the song came first.
Though it seems a natural fit for the singer-songwriter, who taught piano lessons for 35 years, to pen a children's book, it wasn't something she had thought of previously.
Once she had the song and sang it for friends, they put the idea of a book in her head, where it stayed.
"I started singing it to people and several friends said I should turn it into a book," she said, so she set out to figure out how to do it.
The vibrant illustrations on each page are the work of Arielle Miller
Grolman had looked at the work of four artists, sent to her by the publishing company FriesenPress, and hers stood out, Wilf agreed.
"When she sent back the sketches, I laughed out loud," Grolman said. "She interpreted it in ways that hadn't even occurred to me."
An illustration with the character with earplugs in because the mouse was still playing, was one of those ingenious illustrations, Grolman said.
After the song and the book had come together, Grolman thought an animated video of the song was in order.
"Nothing small for me," she said with a laugh.
Local Brian Marchant was the sound engineer for the video; Erik Musseau was the pianist and the video was animated by Darryl LeBlanc.
"The book makes a lot more sense when you are listening to the music," Grolman said.
Publishing a book in 2020 isn't ideal, in terms of promoting it. There can be no book tour, of course, and with Grolman's background — she was a founding director of the Howe Sound Performing Arts Association and spent 28 years producing Carol’s Carols, a Christmas event that showcased local musicians — she had hoped to put on a reading accompanied by fellow musicians.
"My plan was to put on a big musical, book reading event," she said, adding that she hopes to do it next year.
Grolman hopes to publish several more books but is keeping their possible storylines hush-hush for now.
Mouzart is is for sale on her website at www.carolcreates.com, at Armchair Books in Whistler and at the Squamish Adventure Centre.
