Alena Smith is a playwright who studied at the Yale School of Drama. She’s written many plays including “The Piven Monologues,” “Plucker,” and “The Bad Guys,” which was turned into a recent feature film, radio plays (“The Horse Counselor,” “My Virtual Owl”) and various short films (“Writing Date,” “Miss America”). She’s currently a staff writer on the HBO show “The Newsroom.”
Her first book, which just came out, is “Tween Hobo: Off the Rails.” The book began as a twitter account, which is still up and is its own creation. The book is slightly different, crafting a narrative account of the Tween Hobo’s journey across America in the form a diary that she’s left for her daughter, Pineapple Chloe Bieber (yes, you know who is the father). It’s a strange, laugh out funny account of a road trip in the tradition of Jack London and John Steinbeck, but told by a young girl who is fascinated by the strange, antiquated culture others hobos talk of (featuring things like Pearl Jam, Gameboys and Woodstock ’99) and tends to say things like “I take life like I take my gummi bears: headfirst.”
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did the idea for Tween Hobo originally come from?
ALENA SMITH: I used to have a blog with my best friend, novelist Emma Rathbone, where we wrote silly things, like little monologues and prose pieces, just to crack each other up. It was stuff that we could have submitted to McSweeney's or Shouts and Murmurs, except they never would have taken any of it. One of those pieces was about a tween hobo (her original name was "Handkerchief McTramps"). When I joined Twitter (in 2011) I saw that there were a lot of joke accounts, and I wanted to start one, so I looked back through our blog to see if there were any voices or ideas there that could be transplanted to Twitter. Tween Hobo jumped out at me as a good idea. Then I did a Google image search for the words "Tween Hobo" and found that amazing photograph, and the account was launched. The first few tweets were just lines taken directly from the blog post.
AD: How long did it take to find her voice?
AS: At first Tween Hobo's voice was a pretty straightforward mashup of two seemingly incongruous categories: hobo stuff and tween stuff. (Like her first tweet: "Sure as my bowl of mulligan stew, I'll meet them Jonas Brothers one fine day.") As the account persisted in time and gained more followers, the voice and what she was talking about got more complex and layered. I kept discovering new obsessions for her, new aspects to her character. It's funny because she really does feel like her own person. Like when I think of a tweet, I immediately know if that's something I would say, or something Tween Hobo would say. I really think of her as a different entity from myself.
AD: At what point did you try to turn it into a book. What was the process like rethinking the story and how to tell this story?
AS: I created the book proposal along with my illustrator Kate Harmer in the fall of 2012, shortly after I moved to Los Angeles from New York. Our original pitch was that the book would be mostly illustrations, along with some of the best tweets. Like a picture book. When the editor, Jeremie Ruby-Strauss at Gallery Books, offered to buy the book, it was on the condition that I go farther than this original concept. He wanted me to write an entire novel in the voice of Tween Hobo -- and I agreed to give this a shot.
The process of turning the Twitter account into a novel was pretty complicated. First of all, I had to collect all the tweets (which amounted to about 60 pages of writing in and of themselves). Then I had to categorize them to find thematic connections and possible story threads. I used these little piles of tweets as jumping-off points to spin out the longer narrative episodes that make up the book.
I also had to commit to using the diary format (which felt appropriate both for a tween girl, and for a traveling hobo). Once I knew this was a diary, I decided it would be the journal of Tween Hobo's first year out on the road (which begins in the middle of her fifth-grade Social Studies class one day in January). I then had to plot out her journey across America, from east to west and back again. I read a lot of classic novels of the road, like Kerouac and Steinbeck and Jack London. I borrowed from the structure of these, and I also relied on my own experience driving across the country in the summer of 2012 with my fiance when we left Brooklyn and moved to L.A.!
I had all these charts on my wall, like, here's what city she's in, and here's what's happening to her emotionally, and here's where we are in the book, and here's where she can do a little digression about hobo fashion tips.
The biggest difference between her life on Twitter and her life in the book is that in the book, she has a backstory, and a goal -- she goes through something and she changes. That doesn't happen on Twitter. Twitter is gloriously plot-free. It's more like a one-frame comic strip, over and over again. A little snippet of performance art.
AD: I don’t want to get too intellectual here but tween is a marketing term and hobos are outside of the capitalist system and that tension was really interesting. The way that she’s attached to her technology but also very detached from so much of the culture around that technology. Feel free to tell me I’m overthinking, but I kept thinking of that tension throughout as being important.
AS: Absolutely–I think that's the central joke of the idea of a "tween hobo." As if being a penniless drifter might just be another style that you could adopt and buy at Urban Outfitters. Which is really not too far off, if you look at the clothes they're currently selling at Urban Outfitters.
Also, this began as a digital art project–an Internet performance. As such, it was completely unpaid, unasked for, and in a way, much like busking in a subway station or something. There are all kinds of resonances between the freelance 21st-century artist and the hobo. You kind of bop around hoping to get lucky. But you're also just kind of a nuisance to society.
AD: You've written a couple radio plays for The Organist podcast and what do you like about that form?
AS: My co-writers on The Newsroom like to make fun of me and say that there's no dead medium I won't try. Which reminds me of one of my favorite Tween Hobo tweets: "Vaudeville killed the pantomime star."
Anyway, I actually think that we're seeing a resurgence of the audible dramatic form. But that's because all I ever do is listen to podcasts.
What I like about radio plays is that you can close your eyes and listen to them. My eyes get tired. I wish everything was recorded so I could just listen to it.
AD: As you mentioned, you're a writer on The Newsroom and I have to ask, what it’s like?
AS: It's phenomenal! It's a dream come true. This was my first job writing for television and I've gotten to work with the legendary Aaron Sorkin, as well as Paul Lieberstein (Toby from The Office) who is the co-EP and showrunner this year. I've learned an unbelievable amount from them. Aaron is just a preternaturally gifted storyteller -- he's written like 100 hours of television in his life, and he instinctively understands how to push a story forward. He also loves to make his characters the good guys, which is good for me to experience, because I've tended to make all my characters the bad guys (including, for example, in my play called The Bad Guys).
AD: Tween Hobo is your first book, but you're working in television, writing short films, crafting fiction on twitter, you have a new play at the Cape Cod Theater Project next month. Is there a form you like best?
AS: This is a question I ask myself all the time. I've been pretty promiscuous when it comes to form, and the result is that I never know what the hell to do next. For a long time I was very committed to theater, and then I realized that was insane. Now I've opened all these doors–to books, to TV, to film, to Twitter–and sometimes I freak out, but I guess my sense is that ultimately everything is going to turn into the internet anyway, so what's the difference.
AD: Having watched Writing Date, the short film you wrote and co-starred in, I have to ask, what do you think of Homeland?
AS: Haha. I think it's great. Terrorist runs for Congress. What a concept.