In-depth Written Interview

Philip and Erin Stead were interviewed in their home in Northport, Michigan on March 16, 2015.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You are the author and illustrator of the Caldecott-award-winning picture book, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, but your paths crossed long before you created this book. How did you meet?

PHILIP STEAD: Erin and I are both from the Detroit area, and we went to the same high school, which is how we met. We met in art class, which always makes everybody say, aww.

ERIN STEAD: Phil was a couple of years older than I was in school, and he would skip class to hang out with me in the art room.

PHILIP STEAD: I was just about to graduate when I first met Erin, so not long after that I went off to the University of Michigan to study art, and we were apart for a couple years.

ERIN STEAD: But we dated the whole time.

PHILIP STEAD: Yeah, we dated. So one of us was a high school sweetheart.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What encouraged you, creatively speaking, when you were growing up?

PHILIP STEAD: I was always drawing and painting and writing stories, and I started experimenting with music around middle school. I was very lucky because both of my parents were involved in the creative world. They were music majors in college, and my mom was an elementary school music teacher. My dad played in various small orchestras throughout my childhood.

So it was never frowned upon for me to spend a lot of time drawing alone on my bedroom floor. It was seen as a really healthy activity, and I think it was almost expected that I would enter some kind of creative field. I realize now what a lucky way that was to grow up, because a lot of people have to overcome roadblocks to their creativity early in their lives, and I did not have those.

ERIN STEAD: I was a very active kid. I spent a lot of time playing outdoors, and I spent a lot of time drawing indoors. My parents put me in extracurricular classes throughout my entire childhood because I asked, and they said yes. I think that helped me a lot.

Also, our school had a really nice art program. We went to a small school, but the art program felt almost like a college course. We had a couple of very good teachers, including one who we're still very close and who helped us and encouraged us the whole time.

TEACHINGBOOKS: How did your interest in picture books develop?

PHILIP STEAD: I think we came to it from slightly different directions. Prior to high school, I knew I wanted to be an artist, though I didn't know necessarily what kind. Then I had a very specific moment during my sophomore year when everything sort of clicked. My art teacher handed me a pamphlet that showed how Maurice Sendak went about making Where the Wild Things Are, from early dummy stages to finished book. And I can't say exactly why, but something about that process just really spoke to me. From that moment on, I was on a single-minded mission to be a bookmaker.

ERIN STEAD: The best way to describe my interest is to say that I just never grew out of picture books. I've always had them. I never took them off my shelves. Of course there were some that I donated or gave away, but there were always others that I would never give up, and I still have them.

Also, my mother and my godmother, who was in elementary education, would give me picture books every Christmas, no matter how old I was, and that was really formative for me. And it's still something I believe in doing, because I think there are picture books out there that you can relate to at any age.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Please talk about how your educations, both formal and informal, helped influence your understanding of books and illustration down the road.

PHILIP STEAD: There wasn't actually an illustration program at the University of Michigan, so I studied graphic design. I'm really glad I did because down the road, that's what gave us control over what I see as a third element in book making, which is design. There's writing, there's illustration, and there's design, and a lot of times design is handled by the publisher. So from the very beginning, we controlled those three aspects of our books, and we were fortunate to have an editor who was okay with that.

In the end, I also think that not having an illustration department at Michigan allowed me to take a different angle, or approach, into the world of bookmaking because it forced me to get my education about books in other ways. I always credit this used bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, called Kaleidoscope Books, with helping me with that education. I think they've probably got the best stock of out-of-print children's books anywhere in the country. I started going there as a college student. I didn't have very much money, but I forged a relationship with the owner of the store. He knew what kinds of things I was interested in, and he would give me deep discounts on books I would not have been able to afford or even find anywhere else. There were a lot of out-of-print books by Alice and Martin Provensen, and even books by Jerry Pinkney from the 60's and 70's and Eric Carle from the 70's and 80's. These were books that you don't find on bookshelves of even the greatest independent bookstore. I really credit Kaleidoscope with my picture book education.

ERIN STEAD: While Phil was in Michigan, I started at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. I went in as an illustrator and I left as a painter. I kind of lost my way a little bit. But in the end, I'm very happy that I studied painting. I think it was important for me to know about the chemistry of oil paints and different materials, and I fell in love with the process of making art by hand.

Some of my best book education also came from a bookstore. I spent a year of college at the School of Visual Arts in New York. When I was there, I worked part-time at Books of Wonder, and that was the beginning of many years of employment there. Part of training was to sit in the corner of the room, and the manager would take books off the shelf, and you had to read them. So I was reading hundreds of picture books a day, and then I would have to reshelve them. That's how I got to know authors' and illustrators' names.

That's also how I learned what I liked and what I didn't like. It's how I learned how to answer questions for customers who were looking for specific things. That kind of problem solving, I think—finding what each child or adult wants or needs—is what made me realize that a lot of books, even the weird, quiet little ones, have an audience.

TEACHINGBOOKS: There was a lovely stroke of luck and goodwill that led to your first book getting published, Phil, and it started with Erin's work at a bookstore. Could you both talk about that experience?

ERIN STEAD: Before Phil's first book was published we were both doing whatever we could to make contacts and just work in the children's books world. I worked at Books of Wonder and then I worked at a children's publishing house. Phil had been sending out manuscripts and getting rejections. I think we were both thinking, "Well, if we don't make it as authors and illustrators, which is highly probable, we at least want to work within this field that we love."

At Books of Wonder, I was working with thirteen other people who wanted to be authors or illustrators, and I was really lucky because they all happened to be very nice.

PHILIP STEAD: This is where our story gets a little bit magical. Sometimes there are things outside of your control, good or bad, that sort of set you on a path. In our case, we had a lot of good luck. One of those nice people Erin worked with was a manager, Nick Bruel, who went on to become very well known for his Bad Kitty books. After Nick got published, another of Erin's managers, George O'Connor, also got his book published, because Nick introduced George to his editor. George is now known for his Olympians graphic novel series.

So, these great people Erin used to work for and with were being published, and they had this wonderful belief in paying it forward.

ERIN STEAD: We went to a signing for George, and he told Phil to let him know if he ever wanted him to pass anything on to his editor.

PHILIP STEAD: I did, and six months later, when I wasn't even thinking about it, I got a phone call from [George's] editor asking if I'd like to meet. In hindsight, I can't believe he even called me, because I had not submitted an ultra-refined portfolio. But he saw something in it.

So I went to his apartment to meet with him, figuring that if he were going to hire me to do anything, he'd ask me to illustrate somebody else's book. I'd never had anybody ask me what I wanted to make. But that was his first question: What do you want to make? I had to think of something on the fly because I was completely unprepared for that question. I ended up telling him a story that had been told in my family since I was a little kid: the tale of my Grandpa Jack and how he buried his least favorite meal in the backyard and then carved a headstone for it. It's a true story. There really is a casserole dish filled with creamed tuna fish and peas on toast buried in Dearborn, Michigan. And that story went on to become my first book, which was titled Creamed Tuna Fish and Peas on Toast.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Erin, the very first book you illustrated, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, was written by Philip and won the Caldecott medal. How did it come to be published, and what were your feelings at the time you agreed to work on the book?

ERIN STEAD: George O'Connor—the same friend who passed Phil's work on to his editor—had a hand in my getting published, too. At some point he happened to mention to the editor that I also was an artist, but he'd never seen what I make because I'm too shy.

I think within ten minutes of that conversation the editor wrote Philip saying, "I heard your wife's an artist, but she won't show anything."

PHILIP STEAD: That was the entire e-mail. Erin was at work at the time I received it, and without her permission, I went ahead and scanned a couple drawings that she had been working on, and sent them off. And [my editor] wrote back and said, "Lovely. Can we convince her to do a book?"

ERIN STEAD: When I came home from work that day, Phil said, "Don't be mad, but…"

PHILIP STEAD: I told her what I'd done, and that we had a dinner date with my editor.

ERIN STEAD: We had a week before we all went out to dinner, and in the meantime, Phil wrote the first draft of Amos McGee. Then the two of them cornered me in the restaurant and talked to me about illustrating.

Without them doing that, I don't think I would have made a book. I don't think I would have taken the leap. It's scary. It shouldn't be scary, but is—or it was for me at the time. I just wasn't in a place where I thought my drawings were interesting to look at, so I didn't think that anybody else would want to look at them, either. I'd reached a point where I was only making them to keep myself entertained. I had actually stopped drawing for a few years before that, but I realized that my brain was bored. So when I started again, I was kind of just thinking that my fate was to draw privately for myself. And that was okay with me. That sounded pretty good. I came at picture books from a place of reverence where I just didn't think that I had any right to enter that world with my soft, fussy little drawings. So when they asked me to make a book, it really was scary to me.

Now, I think it should be scary, but in a challenging sense. You have to make this creation appear seamless, when in reality, it often is not.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What surprised you about A Sick Day for Amos McGee? Did you have any expectations of the book once it was published?

PHILIP STEAD: Actually, we made Amos not expecting anybody to see it.

ERIN STEAD: It's true. I turned it in and everybody said, "You know, I love this book. But it's a very quiet book. It won't sell." We'd actually joke and say, "Well, it's either going to take the world by a very quiet drizzle, or nothing's going to happen at all."

PHILIP STEAD: But definitely not by storm.

ERIN STEAD: No, definitely not by storm.

PHILIP STEAD: Also, in hindsight, I think the nature of Amos is surprising. Before we'd published anything, if you'd asked me what kind of books we'd be making in our careers, I think I would have said I wanted to publish edgy books, strange books. But then when we were finally given the chance, we were making books about friendship and kindness, and about being nice to each other.

I realize now, after the fact, that these are the things that actually drive me as a person. But I can honestly say I wasn't actively thinking about those themes when I was writing Amos, and I don't think Erin was actively thinking about them when she was illustrating.

ERIN STEAD: No, we were just trying to get a book done—and we thought Amos was going to be our first and last chance to make a picture book, so it had better be the finest one we could possibly make. The entire time I was illustrating, I was conscious of trying to do my very best work so that when I finished, I could honestly tell myself I'd done the best I could.

PHILIP STEAD: I will also say this about Amos: I was thinking that if we were only going to be able to do one book together, I had to do my best to write in a way that played to what Erin does well. And one of the things she does really well is draw relationships between people and animals. So I knew I wanted to write a book for her, one that was all about those kinds of relationships, where every single page of the book called for a work of art that Erin would enjoy creating. So the visual of an old man playing chess with an elephant, or sitting quietly with a penguin, were out there in my mind even before there was a broader story or conflict. I think that maybe some of the reasons the book succeeds are in part because of that enjoyment and pleasure.

ERIN STEAD: I had a painting professor once tell me that you should never pay attention to the stuff you don't love. Don't draw the stuff you don't love, don't paint the stuff you don't love. And that was very good advice, because you can get trapped working on things that you don't care about, and that can weaken your drawing. I think if there's a way you can complete a picture by only drawing the things you love and care about, you've won.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What is your collaborative process like?

PHILIP STEAD: When people ask us who does what part of what book, it's a tricky question to answer, because we truly do books together. Even though it's my name listed as the author and Erin's listed as the illustrator, or, for some books, maybe my name is listed on the copyright page as the designer, it's often all one big stew.

One distinction that I think might set us apart a little bit from other spouses who have done this, though—like Leo and Diane Dillon or the Provensens—is that we don't actually sit at the table and actively make art together.

ERIN STEAD: And we have a strict rule, which is that no one draws on the other person's picture, except in dire circumstances.

PHILIP STEAD: Yes, only if one of us is really, really having trouble will the other step in and actually make the art for them.

ERIN STEAD: And that's only at the sketch level. Phil might do a drawing next to the drawing I'm struggling with and try to crack the code for me, or vice versa. Otherwise, we never, ever get our hands into each other's final artwork.

PHILIP STEAD: Erin and I have very different ways of working, and any time we've tried to blend our two styles into one—

ERIN STEAD: —we make each other worse.

PHILIP STEAD: So we try to avoid that. But when we're talking about what the origin of an idea or image was, it can get murky.

ERIN STEAD: It does get fuzzy, yes. And I think, as with any marriage or partnership, that it's best not to take complete ownership of anything you're both working on, because even though I might think I had a good idea on page three, most likely, Phil had a hand in that idea or was helpful in bringing it to light. So nothing leaves our studio without each other's approval.

TEACHINGBOOKS: You both use a lot of different media in your illustrations. How do you decide your artistic approach, book to book?

ERIN STEAD: Every time we start a book, we try to make the best illustrations possible for that story. So a lot of times that means we change how we make the pictures in order to do a better job. In the short term I'm not always sure that we help ourselves by doing that, but we're always optimistic it will work out.

PHILIP STEAD: It can create a lot of headaches for us, because with almost every book we do, we have to re-educate ourselves in some way. Of course, there's something really nice about that because you don't get stagnant, but there's inevitably a few months of frustration as you're trying to figure out new methods. So, for example, for the book I'm working on right now, I'm using oil pastel. I've never in my life, at any stage, used oil pastels. But I just knew that the quality I could get from oil pastels was something I couldn't get from any other media that I've worked in. So I had to spend three months trying and failing and figuring out how these things work. But now it's starting to come together, and I'm glad I put in that effort.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Erin, two of the books you went on to illustrate after A Sick Day for Amos McGee are And Then It's Spring and If You Want to See A Whale, written by Julie Fogliano. Both stories involve the idea of waiting for something as-yet unseen. Was that a challenging theme for you to tackle, as an illustrator?

ERIN STEAD: When I started working on And Then It's Spring, I knew it was going to be difficult in the sense that it's all about waiting for something that I don't get to illustrate. For thirty pages of the book, you never get to see spring, so I had to figure out how to illustrate something that's not happening. Fortunately, I had an idea that throughout the book, there would be this little team of characters who would move things along. That surprised my editor, who told me he thought the book was going to be full of abstract colors, which was an angle that had never occurred to me. And that's one of the great things about Julie's texts; they can be really fun for an illustrator because you can approach them in a lot of different ways. She presented a similar challenge with If You Want to See a Whale, which talks a lot about this creature that you never see until the very end.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Your latest book together, Lenny and Lucy, involves themes of moving and imaginary friends. In what ways is it different from your previous collaborations?

PHILIP STEAD: In some ways it's a difficult book to describe, but I will say that, if the books that Erin and I have made up to this point tend to be a little softer and sweeter, this one has a little bit more darkness.

ERIN STEAD: It's a little sadder.

PHILIP STEAD: And there's an edge to it.

ERIN STEAD: But only a little edge.

PHILIP STEAD: Only a little bit. Also, it's mostly black and white, which was a struggle in some ways because the children's book world right now is a very full-color world. So ushering it through to completion had its challenges. But I'm proud of it.

TEACHINGBOOKS: When you're not working together or on solo projects, you tend to make books with close friends.

PHILIP STEAD: Yes, and that's definitely a little unusual. But I think it's really hard for us to imagine working another way, especially since the first books we made were with each other. We became accustomed to a back-and-forth collaboration between author and illustrator.

For example, when we were working on Amos McGee, there is this whole stretch that exists in the book now that's told mostly wordlessly as the animals leave the zoo and then wait for the bus. In the initial manuscript I handed to Erin, that part was fully written out, and it was only through the process of working together that we realized that it functions much better without the text.

ERIN STEAD: Editing text with friends—and this is specific to the way we work—is a lot easier and faster than doing it the traditional way, which is that you would tell your art director or editor what you wanted to communicate to the author, and then the editor would go back to the author and say, "This is what that crazy illustrator wants to do."

Our back-and-forth approach is a faster way for us to move the rhythm of a book around, and we've really gotten used to doing it that way. I struggle with the idea of letting that control go. Still, though, there are definitely moments when you have to know when to butt out, whether you're the author or illustrator.

PHILIP STEAD: One of the most fun books I've ever worked on was one that had me butting out practically right from the very beginning, and that was when I worked with Mathew Cordell on Special Delivery. This was the first book I'd ever done where I wrote the text, but then didn't live with it every single day while the art was being created. It was in Matt's hands, and I was so glad to work with my friend. I really like his sensibility, his line work, and his sense of humor. I could get excited about what he might include in his art, rather than worry about what he might do.

He came up with all this wild stuff that I had never even anticipated. For instance, I never indicated in the manuscript that the bandits would be monkeys. And there's Mary, the airline pilot whose sidekick is a pig. Why does she have a pig as a sidekick? Those kinds of details were all Matt, and it's those kinds of weird turns that made me want to work with him in the first place.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Do you have other creative pursuits, outside of bookmaking?

ERIN STEAD: I think non-book art is something that we always wish we could spend a little more time on. I often think I would love to paint landscapes for fun, but as of right now, I think we're making a few too many books to do a whole lot of that. But it's funny how often someone will come up to me at a signing and say in this sort of apologetic tone that they're a watercolor painter on the weekends. What they don't understand is that I envy that, because there is a freedom to making art just for yourself. At some point I would like to make that a bigger part of my life again. I would like to learn how to throw pots on a wheel.

PHILIP STEAD: I think it's really important that creative people have some kind of creative outlet that's not related to paying the bills. But it's not always easy to find. For me, in some ways, it's music. I'm not great at any particular instrument, but there is some freedom in not being very talented and just being able to sort of pluck away at the guitar or hammer away at a piano, just to experience making something for the sake of making something.

TEACHINGBOOKS: When you're writing or illustrating, what do you do when you get stuck?

ERIN STEAD: When we get stuck, one of the things we always say to each other is, "I don't know how people do this alone." That's because we have the benefit of being able to turn and look across the room to the other person and say, "I don't know what I'm doing—can you help me with this?"

PHILIP STEAD: We get to cheat in that way, where other illustrators and authors who work solo do not.

The other advice I give myself is to just keep moving, even when I don't know what I'm doing. If I stay moving, often something will happen.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Is there such a thing as a typical workday for you?

PHILIP STEAD: No, not really. But I can tell you what we don't do: we do not work first thing in the morning. We love our mornings and we keep them sacred. We have our coffee, and we spend time just being quiet with the dog. Then afternoons are when our workday really begins.

ERIN STEAD: But we're always out of the studio by 10:00 or 11:00 at night, or else bad things happen.

PHILIP STEAD: Yes. We call 11:00 the hour of despair.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell students when you meet with them?

PHILIP STEAD: I don't necessarily like to tell them any particular thing, but I do love reading to them because you get to actually see your books in action. It sounds almost cliché, but I learn so much about the books by reading them, things that I just didn't even realize while making them.

ERIN STEAD: A lot of times I discover there are things I've never thought were funny about a book that kids do. One example we've come across a lot is when you turn the page in Amos McGee and you see Amos playing chess with an elephant.

PHILIP STEAD: We never thought of that as particularly funny, but apparently it can bring really big laughs to a crowd of first graders. That kind of thing makes me appreciate a story more because it helps me experience the book in the way that a child experiences it. There's something really nice about that.

TEACHINGBOOKS: What do you like to tell educators?

PHILIP STEAD: Be enthusiastic about books. You don't have to have a purpose or agenda for every book a kid reads, other than wanting the child to have a positive experience with it. Also, I think it's good to remember that not all books are read-alouds, and that's okay. Some books really ought to be read by one child all alone, or by one adult to one child. Then, there are books that work very well when they're read to a crowd. Both kinds of books have value.

ERIN STEAD: I think teachers and librarians have the best job and the hardest job—and I think they're underappreciated. Which is why I think it's important that they know how much their enthusiasm means to kids. I think that's what stays with kids the longest, whether the kids are preschoolers or in high school. I think about my third grade teacher and how much I loved that lady.

TEACHINGBOOKS: Since the publication of A Sick Day for Amos McGee, you've both gone on to write and illustrate several highly acclaimed picture books. Can you reflect a bit on winning the Caldecott medal on your very first collaboration?

ERIN STEAD: To this day, it's still really difficult for me to reflect on winning the Caldecott. It's difficult for me to say the words, "winning the Caldecott." It was my first book, and in a lot of ways I had to concentrate on moving on, because I wanted to get better. I wanted to continue being an illustrator and I wanted to be a better illustrator.

But as far as the moment of winning goes, and the few years I've had afterwards, and how much that committee has changed my life . . . Thinking about it is often completely overwhelming. That committee worked so hard, and the fact that they picked Amos, especially that year, is still mind-boggling to me.

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