Meet Your Maker: Here's what inspires Dickinson creator Alena Smith

On her writer origin story

While Smith can't remember what specifically ignited her passion for writing, she does recall that poetry, like her Dickinson heroine, was one of her first loves. "The thing is I was always writer because I wrote poetry [as a child]. In third grade I had notebooks full of poems. So I've never stopped being a writer," says Smith, who studied playwriting at Yale School of Drama. "I think everything that I read and pull into myself and experience, I'm always doing it as a writer. I'm digging for material as I'm living through my days. So it really is impossible to say [what sparked it because] it wasn't like there was one thing. It's always just been who I am."

On the power of non-fiction

Smith often finds non-fiction more inspiring than fictional works. "Reading a book of theory, a book of ideas, it often triggers a lot. I get sparked creatively by that more than, for example, watching a season of television or reading a novel," says Smith. "I find ideas themselves to be dramatic. I think there's a drama to ideas."

In fact, she has an example from Dickinson that illustrates what she means. "In season 1, I read a bunch of academic theory about queerness and how in the 19th century, they didn't have the same vocabulary or the same categories for queerness that we have today, but how perhaps you could conceive of that as actually being [liberating]," she recalls. "Rather than being like, 'Oooh, those poor people in the past that didn't even know [or] couldn't come out or say I'm gay, they didn't have the words for it.' But actually to see it as they may have had access to experiences and sensualities that we are cutoff from because we have more boxes that we put people in. That's just a straight, very dry academic take. But I read about about [Henry David] Thoreau that got into, and it turned me on, it got me excited. I wanted to find ways of dramatizing that."

On the two shows that had the most impact on her

That being said, there are two series that left a mark on her: My So-Called Life and Mad Men. "Those were two shows that definitely made me feel something from the medium of television that felt so personal," says Smith. "It felt like I had an intimate relationship with the cast of those shows and that it was that experience of, 'Oh, this is helping to tell my story. This is helping to tell a story of the moment that I'm going through as a person,' or something like that."

On learning from children's books and reading to her twins

"I think that I have always been really inspired by children's books and children's literature. I read a lot as a kid and now I have kids and I'm reading to them, and it's been a real beautiful reminder of the basics of storytelling and how much stories mean to people," she says. "I read Charlotte's Web out loud to my kids and was crying by the end. And I'm convinced that it's the greatest book ever written. So I don't know, that's definitely another place I go to. That one I'm proud to put on the shelf of really important ones."

On the similarities between Tween Hobo and Dickinson

In between graduating from Yale and landing her first TV writing gig on My America, Smith wrote several plays and, in 2011, launched the joke Twitter account Tween Hobo, which eventually became a book.

"With both Tween Hobo and with Dickinson, I think that I was disguising serious cultural critique in a form that is easy to hear about and laugh at, at first: 'Oh, Emily Dickinson twerking, that sounds dumb!' or 'a Tween Hobo,'" she says. "I guess the point is that I have a willingness to laugh at myself, but I also have an interest in looking at all the ways the internet has affected society. Television is a medium caught up inside of the internet right now. So, I think what I'm trying to say is that being online a lot has been a curse and a blessing. It's easy for what you're doing to seem sillier than it is, but the flip side and the payoff of it is that I feel by speaking to my own generation and the generation younger than me, and actually paying attention to what is going on in our culture and our society, the work did land and it found an audience that did understand it, or something like that."

On her most important mentors

The Affair alum counts two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and Dickinson writer Lynn Nottage (Clyde's) as one of her impactful mentors. "She has radical politics combined with a really classical sense of form," says Smith about her former playwriting professor. "She's all about the well told tale, but she's doing it with a purpose to challenge and speak truth to power. And I think that that's amazing."

Even though they aren't too far apart in age, Smith also looks up to Dickinson pilot director David Gordon Green. "It's not like we necessarily agree on a lot of stuff, but I do consider him a role model and mentor in certain ways," she says. "One thing that I just love about David is he just never stops having fun. He always has been so loyal to his community of artists that he came up with and keeps workin with them, and I think that's fabulous."

On making her directorial debut

Smith decided to direct Dickinson's series finale because her agent said she needed to start building out that part of her resumé if she eventually wanted to helm a movie idea she had. "Honestly, I was scared to do it," she says. "And then I did it, and first of all, I was like, 'Wait a minute, why was I scared?' I was already basically doing this because that's what you do when you're a showrunner, you run the show. Obviously, there was no part of the process that I wasn't intimately involved in, but because I came from this place of being like, 'Well, I'm a writer, I don't need to direct. I'll let the directors do that,' because I was the one overseeing it anyway. But I think to be pushed to physically take that step where you're the one in the chair, you're the one who the actors are looking to directly with no middle man, and that you're the captain of the ship — it's funny because it's a woman thing, too. It's like giving myself the permission to take up that little extra space."

She continues: "Once I did, it felt so natural and healthy. It was really wonderful. I know for sure it was a wonderful experience for me and Hailee to sail to the end together because it had always been us anyway at the helm of it. But I think it goes back to my training as a playwright where I was told that [directing and writing are] very different roles and that you do one but you don't do the other."

On where she wants to go after Dickinson

While Smith believes she'll always find non-fiction and theory inspiring, she wants to challenge herself to push beyond that with her next project. "In some ways, Dickinson was so many things at once that I'm excited about perhaps doing a bit of radical simplicity and pairing back, and maybe trying to hone in in a more direct, simple way on this basic thing that I do, which is writing for performance — [and] getting into that texture of everyday life in a way that doesn't need to be coded within all the crazy games of Dickinson," she says. "I think my work already has a lot of intimacy in it, but I think I could go even more into an intimacy that is less guarded by a lot of intellectual ideas."

Overall, Smith is excited about what the future holds for her career. "TV has changed a lot from what it used to be. Someone like me, who has this background in playwriting an is more of a literary person, probably wouldn't have been doing TV 15 years ago, but now we are," she says. "At the same time, I guess when I look at whose career I want to [model mine after] or what kind of career is this, it's much easier for me to map myself onto a writer, director, filmmaker than it is any given showrunner. Because ultimately, what I want to is execute my own artistic vision within this given medium. And I do see more to model myself on in a Pedro Almodóvar or a Jane Campion, or the Cohen brothers, than necessarily like Ryan Murphy, with all due respect to Ryan Murphy. But I don't know that I'm thinking so much in terms of that kind of scale. It's more [about] going from project to project, world to world, and trying to develop a coherent vision, and hopefully bring an audience with me along the way. I think of myself as a filmmaker at this point. That's what I want to do. That's how I feel fulfilled."