FEATURE
Jim Petipas
Jim Petipas Creates an Udderly Entertaining Book Series by Melissa Fales
When author/illustrator Jim Petipas was in high school, he and some friends wrote a silly song about cows which they performed for skit night at their summer camp. “We came up with some funny lyrics and a pretty catchy tune,” Petipas recalls. “Years later, when I sang it for my daughters, they said, ‘Dad, you should turn that song into a children’s picture book.’ I thought that was a pretty good idea.” The result is The Cows Go Moo!, Petipas’s first children’s book, and the first installment in what will be a three-book bovine series. Petipas started drawing at a young age and studied drafting in high school in hopes of becoming an architect. “When I was a kid, my parents brought me to the library often,” he says. “I can still picture the spot in the corner where all the how-to-draw books were. His parents also encouraged his love of music. His father bought him a mismatched drum set when Petipas was in the eighth grade, and he played in various bands throughout college and beyond. “I still play drums almost every day and I’ve started begging my wife to let me start up a band in the near future,” he says. With the expectation that he would work in his stepfather’s appliance store, Petipas went to college and earned a degree in business. He worked at the store first as a janitor, then an installer, working 42
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his way up to a sales position. “They were going to make me the manager of my own store, but I felt very unfulfilled doing that type of work,” he says. Instead, Petipas followed a calling to earn a degree in youth ministry and spent 15 years working as a youth pastor. He loved the job, but since his wife had a high-powered job in Boston, it meant that a nanny was raising their two young girls. “It wasn’t right for our family to continue in that mode,” Petipas says. “We weren’t parenting our kids the way we wanted to be. We decided that I’d stay home with the kids.” Later, Petipas earned a master’s degree in family counseling and nine years ago, he began counseling adolescents. It’s a job he continues to do part-time. “My passion for helping teenagers navigate their lives is right up there with my passion for art,” he says. Over the course of these different careers, Petipas hadn’t been keeping up with his drawing. Once he decided that he was going to translate the cow song into a children’s book, Petipas struggled to get beyond a few sketches. “I didn’t have a process, so I didn’t get anywhere with it,” he says. “Six years went by and I hadn’t done much. That’s when I heard about a class at MassArt. It took me through the process of creating a book dummy for The Cows Go Moo! It was awesome. I was so happy to have completed it.”
