Millay Hyatt is a passionate train traveler: it’s the charm of the “unpadded encounter with the world” that still makes her swap every airplane for a trip by rail. She knows that you see things differently when you are away from home and on the move, and this is particularly true on the train, at half speed: the train window becomes a temptation, with moving images and entire landscape films running past it. In the carriage itself, we become voyeurs, interested in the most intimate habits of our fellow passengers. We listen to couples arguing, draw psychograms of the people sitting next to us. On rails, a way of thinking is set in motion that disturbs our certainties. As travelers, we enter a school of perception in which our own perspective is placed in relation to others. The train journey promises the happiness of setting off and arriving – and in between the bittersweet joy of self-questioning.
Based on countless journeys of her own, Millay Hyatt draws a literary, allusive cartography of the train journey, in which the dramaturgy of farewells, observed a thousand times, comes into its own, as does the transformation of those arriving home – and at the same time the insight that crossing borders is not a pleasurable experience for everyone.
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Millay Hyatt, born in 1973 in Dallas/Texas, USA, has a doctorate in philosophy and lives as a freelance author and translator in Berlin. Her essays and stories have been published in various media; her book Ungestillte Sehnsucht. Wenn der Kinderwunsch uns umtreibt was published in 2012. (Ch. Links). In 2020 and 2021 she received scholarships from the Berlin Senate. She is currently performing in Lola Arias' play Mother Tongue at the Gorki Theater in Berlin.
