Thinking outside the ‘daily concrete life’: How puppets and picture books create a sense of possibility
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Junk drawers were Minnesota artist and children’s author Anne Sawyer’s favorite thing growing up. You know, the drawer that is chock-full of batteries, twist ties, straws and more.
That drawer provided her with an endless arsenal of inspiration.
“My preferred form of play was the junk drawer,” Sawyer says. “My mother and relatives would give me lovely dolls, for example, and I liked them. I thought they were nice, but I didn't play with them, per se. What I would do is put them on a shelf so I could look at them, but then I would go to the junk drawer and make little diddies and tell myself stories.”
Sawyer’s artistry is vast. Her resume includes shadow puppetry, puppet construction, costume design, creative writing, program development and leadership, stilt-walking and even being fluent in Spanish. Sawyer, in many respects, has done it all.
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Her latest children’s book is “The Pollinator’s Gift.” It's about two kids who visit their nana’s garden and are scared of the bees, but through the rhymed story, they learn the important role pollinators play.
Sawyer is also the director of ArtStart, an art educational program, where she has been an artist since 2007.
Gravitating towards picture books was a natural extension from her puppeteering, Sawyer says. She grew up hearing books from her parents and regularly visiting the library. For her, storytelling was the common denominator.
She has long been fascinated by the pollination process, and after receiving a grant to fund this endeavor, she was hooked. She researched facets of pollination and insects to distill the facts into a story meant for an elementary level.
One of the biggest differences was that puppetry relies on icons and archetypes that guide how characters are performed. But, for Sawyer, writing about the scientific process that makes flowers bloom or plants grow was less clear-cut.
“I don't know that there's an archetype of a ladybug. Maybe there is,” she jokes.
It was a process of collaboration similar to her puppet or improv training. But instead of existing as a performance, the collaboration was on paper. She worked with graphic artists on the colors and layout of the book and she translated the story into Spanish.
“It's fair to say that every time I create a book, there's a lot of thrashing around trying to figure out how I'm going to do this,” Sawyer says.
For Sawyer, that creative “sloppiness” isn’t a flaw — it’s part of what makes the process meaningful. It’s a space where her imagination runs wild, something she thinks the world needs now more than ever.
“There's always been a lot of societal pressure, I think, to make everybody kind of march in lockstep,” she says. But that pressure doesn’t exist in the worlds of puppets and picture books.
“It’s a safe space where people can break rules of time and space, and things can talk and sing, and, you know, mice are more fierce than tigers,” Sawyer says.
“There's all kinds of things that I love about picture books and puppet shows that have to do with giving us the permission to think outside of the daily concrete life.”
