I discovered these small mid-century train toy train figures in 2019 and quickly became excited about the many ways I could create stories with them.  They demand a kind of close and careful attention to detail and gesture.  Add a Hipstamatic digital camera lens and filters, and they come to life.

Julie Marie Myatt: Playwright of Welcome Home Jenny Sutter. Photo by Jenny Graham.

I am a playwright by profession and a teacher of playwriting at Northwestern University.  I have always taken photographs as a part of my work, and, as a need to keep my visual language alive. Photography provides the immediate creative rush I need when writing a play can take years of work and patience, and often the invitation of others to produce and bring to the stage.

Like many artforms and communities that depend on our being together, the pandemic shut down theater for nearly two years.  (It is just now coming back.)  I couldn’t write. It felt impossible and inappropriate, but I needed to create.  I need it to survive.  These tiny people became my new language.  They became the stand-ins for the many things I longed to do: they could travel anywhere they wanted, be together in small spaces without fear, and jump into well-known paintings like a dreaming museum patron.  

As the photographs continued to grow (I now have hundreds and hundreds) and the isolation continued, I discovered the tiny people themselves wanted new kinds of freedom and forms.  Soon I was creating wooden boxes with stories. Then the boxes too felt confining, and I was collecting rocks from the lake and gluing tiny people on them, obsessively.  Super glue, glitter, gemstones, words.

What the tiny people can’t and couldn’t avoid, are my questions and yearning and the loss surrounding us.  The chaotic state of the world.  The pandemic might have spared them some things, but they still inherited my playwright heart and eyes and impulses.  Thus, these tiny actors long to be witnessed by an audience who can bring their own hearts and experiences, to complete our tale.