![]() When her program ended, she moved to Park Slope, in Brooklyn, and started to put on plays. Graduate school rewired her nerdery, diverting some of it toward character and story. In college, Smith had majored in philosophy. The only playwrights she could name were Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard she thought that Tennessee Williams was a woman. Instead of a wraith, scribbling on scraps, this Dickinson was meticulously constructing her legacy through poems that stowed away the infinite in the small. She liked how the biography upended the popular vision of the poet. At home, her bedroom window opened out onto Dickinsonia: farmland, horses, graveyards. Dickinson’s obscurity, while she lived, was at odds with the heat of her talent her poetry seemed desperate to connect with people, to be understood. A spark caught: there was something magnetizing about a life so streaked with irony. ![]() She was working at a bookstore and waiting for a decision from the Yale School of Drama, to which she had applied as a playwright, having written exactly one play: a remix of Lewis Carroll, by way of Wittgenstein, called “Alice Eat Your Words.” At the bookstore, a tiny shop across the street from Vassar College, Smith happened upon a biography of Emily Dickinson by the scholar Alfred Habegger. In the early two thousands, the writer and showrunner Alena Smith, then a recent college graduate, was living at her parents’ house in the Hudson Valley.
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