After publishing around 30 books together in 15 years as a creative duo, it took Erin and Phil Stead a while to come back to the story that got it all started.

The Ann Arbor couple’s first book together, A Sick Day for Amos McGee, set an impossibly high bar, winning over literary critics as the recipient of the prestigious Caldecott Medal, while becoming a defining children’s book of a generation.

While the Steads worked up the courage to publish a sequel in 2021 with Amos McGee Misses the Bus, putting the book out into the world during the COVID-19 pandemic meant the couple couldn't tour and promote it.

That has made the promotion of the recently published third book in the series, A Snow Day for Amos McGee, all the more gratifying, Phil said, as the Steads have been able to connect with lifelong fans.

“It's just been really, really rewarding to see people's enthusiasm for the book and enthusiasm for the character,” Phil Stead said. “This is the first time that we're seeing grown-ups who had the book as children—college-aged kids that are bringing their battered copies from when they were five or six of the first book, and now they're excited to see Amos back.”

Living in Ann Arbor together since 2008, the Steads will close out a season of promoting A Snow Day For Amos McGee with a special event on December 11 at Literati Bookstore, offering those who attend the ticketed event special handmade, limited-edition woodblock prints the couple is famous for featuring in their books.

After being on the road for most of the fall, Erin Stead said the event is a chance to celebrate and connect with a community that has always supported their work.

“What we want is for it to be like a holiday party,” she said. “The reason we really haven't left Ann Arbor since 2008 is that it's such an easy place to live sometimes, because there are so many people that are looking out for you, whether or not you even realize it. The city has really become like a family to us.”

Ann Arbor has served as the creative backdrop for the Steads since they quit their jobs and moved from upstate New York about halfway through the process of creating A Sick Day for Amos McGee.

A friend hooked the couple up with an apartment and work space in a renovated 100-year-old barn, where Erin spent days carefully crafting the woodblock-printed illustrations of Amos and his zoo animal friends that would become the book series' calling card.

The intention was to use a technique that made A Sick Day for Amos McGee feel timeless, Erin said, pairing perfectly with the book’s plot of how a zookeeper is cared for by his animal friends when he gets ill.

It’s also a process that takes time to complete: A single page can take anywhere from a week to 10 days to make, while a larger piece of art spanning two pages could take two weeks or more.

“I wanted to play off the old printing methods where you would print a solid color behind basically an ink drawing,” she said. “Because my drawings are finicky and a little fussy, the experiment was that I thought that the texture of the wood block, with the way that you could see the wood grain, would communicate well with the way I naturally make pencil marks.”

Like the book’s muted color illustrations, central character Amos McGee has always stood out for his quiet, understated kindness, Phil said, becoming an inspiration for the books they’ve published since, including Bear Has a Story to Tell and Lenny & Lucy, which tackle subjects of friendship and a sense of belonging.

As time has passed, Phil said he believes Amos McGee’s simple message of “be kind to animals” continues to resonate with readers, young and old.

“The thing I just kept coming back to was, be kind to animals,” he said. “If you just start there, so many other things in your life will be figured out. Amos is the embodiment of that. He's unfailingly kind to the animals in his life, and so you know you can trust him for that reason.

“In the age of the internet, where everything's always happening at lightning speed and whoever can shout the loudest gets the most airtime, Amos is nothing like that. He's going to move slower. He's not going to be the loudest in the room ever. The books we've made have just gotten quieter and quieter over the years and we've just been really pleased that has in no way damaged their ability to make it out into the world—that people seem to really appreciate that sense of quiet that exists in our books.”

On A Snow Day for Amos McGee, the zookeeper anticipates weather that will bring a snow day, but it doesn’t arrive. When a surprising overnight snowfall blankets the town, however, Amos is once again visited at home by his zoo animal friends who come to play in the powdery white snow.

Erin Stead said the wintery setting always inspires her to be contemplative. The book, though, examines the emotions associated with being let down when something that is expected to happen doesn’t.

“I like what happens to the world [when it snows]. It quiets down,” she said. “But as someone who makes art for kids, the feeling that we were talking about is that feeling of, 'I know it's coming, it's gonna snow,' and then it just doesn't. The thing about Amos is that you've got this crew of friends that help each other. So, how could they help each other through the disappointment of not having a snow day and then it coming when you don't expect it to?”

One of the biggest rewards of making books for children, Erin said, is that the audience is exceptionally honest.

Knowing that has been a guide for her work as an illustrator, she said, acknowledging that anything less than complete honesty will turn away a younger audience.

“What you're dealing with might be seemingly simple, but really, the things that we're talking about in picture books most of the time are the things that we deal with the rest of our lives, it's just that adults like to complicate them,” she said. “You're still trying to figure out love and loss as a two-year-old, the same way that you are when [you're grown up].”

Martin Slagter is a writer and reporter with 18 years of experience in print and digital media. He also writes about Michigan-based music in his weekly newsletter Radio Amor. 

Erin and Phil Stead close out a season of promoting "A Snow Day For Amos McGee" with a special event at 7 pm on December 11 at Literati Bookstore, 124 East Washington Street, Ann Arbor. Tickets at available here.