Theresa Helburn

Theresa Helburn

Theresa was born on January 12, 1887 in New York City.  As a child her mother frequently took her to the theater which she loved! She graduated from Bryn Mawr College in 1908 and took up writing producing a few plays, none of which were terribly successful.  In 1914 she co-founded the Washington Street Players in New York City, later called the Theatre Guild, which presented European plays.   

The Guild enjoyed a successful first season and gained a reputation as America’s foremost art theater, specializing in bringing the highest-quality drama of Europe and America to Broadway stages. Theresa was the executive Director and took part in all aspects of production, using her writing talents to rewrite dialogue, (with- and sometimes, without - the playwrights approval) and became known as the “play doctor.”

Despite some great success, the Guild was bankrupts in 1943. Theresa decided to turn the play Green Grow the Lilacs into a musical and hired Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein to write it.  The result was the musical Oklahoma! which became a great success and revolutionized American musical theater.  The Kiowa Indian tribe of Oklahoma made Theresa a chief and named her “Little Lady Who Sees Far.”

Two years later she again hired Rodgers and Hammerstein to turn the play Liliom into a musical and the result was Carousel, another great hit. She continued to bring serious plays to the American public and established close working relationships with Eugene O’Neill and George Bernard Shaw.  

"Aunt"Clara Brown

Clara “Aunt Clara” Brown

Happy New Year!

Wishing all a very peaceful, prosperous 2014 filled with joy, love and creativity!!
To begin this auspicious New Year a quote from Mary Oliver, one of my all time favorite poets.  It is if she writes for me, and me along!  Of course I know that isn't the case but she so often really hits my heart as if it had a bulls eye and she can see it.

" I want to think again of dangerous and noble things...I want to be improbable and beautiful and afraid of nothing as thought I had wings."

Wishing you all wings for this fresh, new year!


Mary and her best friend!

Poet Mary Oliver is an “indefatigable guide to the natural world,” wrote Maxine Kumin in the Women’s Review of Books, “particularly to its lesser-known aspects.” Oliver’s verse focuses on the quiet of occurrences of nature: industrious hummingbirds, egrets, motionless ponds, “lean owls / hunkering with their lamp-eyes.” Kumin noted that Oliver “stands quite comfortably on the margins of things, on the line between earth and sky, the thin membrane that separates human from what we loosely call animal.” Oliver’s poetry has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and a Lannan Literary Award. Reviewing Dream Work(1986) for the Nation, critic Alicia Ostriker numbered Oliver among America’s finest poets, as “visionary as [Ralph Waldo] Emerson.” 

Mary Oliver was born in 1935 in Maple Heights, Ohio. She attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College, but did not receive a degree from either institution. As a young poet, Oliver was deeply influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay and briefly lived in Millay’s home, helping Norma Millay organize her sister’s papers. Oliver is notoriously reticent about her private life, but it was during this period that she met her long-time partner, Molly Malone Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and the surrounding Cape Cod landscape has had a marked influence on Oliver’s work. Known for its clear and poignant observations and evocative use of the natural world, Oliver’s poetry is firmly rooted in place and the Romantic nature tradition. Her work received early critical attention; American Primitive (1983), her fifth book, won the Pulitzer Prize. According to Bruce Bennetin the New York Times Book Review, American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical.” Bennet commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision” and asserted that the “collection contains a number of powerful, substantial works.” Holly Prado of the Los Angeles Times Book Review also applauded Oliver’s original voice, writing that American Primitive “touches a vitality in the familiar that invests it with a fresh intensity.” 

Dream Work (1986) continues Oliver’s search to “understand both the wonder and pain of nature” according to Prado in a later review for the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Ostriker considered Oliver “among the few American poets who can describe and transmit ecstasy, while retaining a practical awareness of the world as one of predators and prey.” For Ostriker, Dream Work is ultimately a volume in which Oliver moves “from the natural world and its desires, the ‘heaven of appetite’...into the world of historical and personal suffering...She confronts as well, steadily,” Ostriker continued, “what she cannot change.” 

The transition from engaging the natural world to engaging more personal realms is also evident in New and Selected Poems (1992), which won the National Book Award.The volume contains poems from eight of Oliver’s previous volumes as well as previously unpublished, newer work. Susan Salter Reynolds, in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, noticed that Oliver’s earliest poems are almost always oriented towards nature, but seldom examine the self and are almost never personal. In contrast, Oliver appears constantly in later works. But as Reynolds noted “this self-consciousness is a rich and graceful addition.” Just as the contributor for Publishers Weekly called particular attention to the pervasive tone of amazement with regard to things seen in Oliver’s work, Reynolds found Oliver’s writings to have a “Blake-eyed revelatory quality.” Oliver summed up her desire for amazement in her poem “When Death Comes” from New and Selected Poems: “When it’s over, I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. / I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.” 

Oliver continues her celebration of the natural world in later collections, includingWinter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems (1999), Why I Wake Early (2004),New and Selected Poems, Volume 2 (2004), and Swan: Poems and Prose Poems(2010). Critics have compared Oliver to other great American lyric poets and celebrators of nature, including Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Edna St. Vincent Millay, John Muir, and Walt Whitman. “Oliver’s poetry,” wrote Poetry contributorRichard Tillinghast in a review of White Pine (1994) “floats above and around the schools and controversies of contemporary American poetry. Her familiarity with the natural world has an uncomplicated, nineteenth-century feeling.” 

A prolific writer of both poetry and prose, Oliver publishes a new collection every year or two. Her main themes continue to be the intersection between the human and the natural world, as well as the limits of human consciousness and language in articulating such a meeting. Jeanette McNew in Contemporary Literature described “Oliver’s visionary goal,” as “constructing a subjectivity that does not depend on separation from a world of objects. Instead, she respectfully confers subjecthood on nature, thereby modeling a kind of identity that does not depend on opposition for definition…At its most intense, her poetry aims to peer beneath the constructions of culture and reason that burden us with an alienated consciousness to celebrate the primitive, mystical visions that reveal ‘a mossy darkness – / a dream that would never breathe air / and was hinged to your wildest joy / like a shadow.’”

Mary Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College until 2001. In addition to such major awards as the Pulitzer and National Book Award, Oliver has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. She has also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

From the National Poetry Foundation

Edith Stratton Kitt

Edith Stratton Kitt

In her own words: “I was born in Florence, Arizona Territory, on December 15, 1878. That birth was really quite an experience for my father since I arrived while he was scouring the town looking for the only doctor, whom he found later, drunk and playing cards in the back room of a saloon.  The small house in which I was born had dirt walls, a dirt floor and a dirt roof. There was only one board floor in the village and that was in the most prosperous saloon.  Once in a while the townspeople would clear out the bar and hold dances in this saloon.  All the mothers brought their babies and pub them to bed on a long bench.  Mother was from New England, but she did go to these dances until some man sat on me.  After that, she refused to go any more.

Our home was thirty miles from Tucson as the crow flies, but seventy five as the road crawled.  Mother was once on the ranch for eight months without seeing another American woman.”

Edith enjoyed a tomboyish youth; doing chores, riding and hunting.  She began riding as a baby in a sling from an old tablecloth knotted around her father’s neck and shoulder.  She eventually graduated to her own horse, “Little Bill” and was given her first shotgun at ten with which she hunted quail, duck, deer and skunk, because “skunk skins were worth fifty cents to a dollar and in one season I made fifteen dollars.”

She studies at the University of Arizona and became a teacher and taught in Colorado and Tucson for several years before marrying George Kitt in 1903.

She transcribed many oral histories over the years and was secretary of the Arizona Historical Society (formerly the Pioneer’s Historical Society. She is credited with making this library one of the top research centers in the Southwest. 

Ann Preston

Ann Preston

Ann was born December 1, 1813 in the Quaker settlement of West Grove in Pennsylvania near Philadelphia. She attended school but also helped care for her six younger siblings as her mother’s health was poor.  She was also active in the local anti-slavery society.

When her siblings grew to be more independent she began teaching.  At this time she also became interested in physiology and recognizing the need for more information on the subject, she initiated classes in female physiology and hygiene for women and girls.

In 1847 she embarked on a two year apprenticeship with Dr. Nathaniel Moseley in Philadelphia. Completing the apprenticeship she applied to four medical colleges in Pennsylvania but was rejected solely because she was female. In 1850 a group of Quakers founded the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania to meet the needs of the many women seeking a career in medicine.  Just shy of her thirty seventh birthday Ann enrolled in the first class with seven other women.

After graduating she remained at the college as a professor of physiology and hygiene.  In 1858 she initiated a fundraising campaign to build a woman’s hospital in connection with the college to provide hands on clinical instruction.

In 1866 Ann was appointed dean of the Woman’s Medical College, the first woman to hold that position. She applied for permission for her students to attend general clinics at the Philadelphia Hospital but was met with demonstrations by male medical students protesting the impropriety of educating men and women in medicine together.  She fought this narrow-mindedness saying women were patients and it was “in accordance with the instincts of the truest womanhood for women to appear as physicians and students.”  Philadelphia newspapers published her comments.

Annie Lawry

Annie was born on November 13, 1866 somewhere near Lovelock, Nevada.  Her mother was a Paiute Indian and her father was a white man who was often away from home for long periods of time.  While he was away she and her mother reverted to Indian ways but when he was around he insisted that everyone speak English and discouraged anything Paiute.  He enrolled Annie in the local school where she was the first Indian to attend with white children and possibly the first Paiute to go to school at all.

Eventually Mr. Lowry grew prosperous and his Indian family became an embarrassment so he deserted them never to return to them.  When he left Annie gave up all white ways and returned to her Indian heritage and ways. Years later when he died friends urged Annie to travel to Oregon and make a claim to her inheritance.  She refused not wishing to make any trouble for her two brothers who were living as whites. She did domestic work which was the only work available to Indian women for about $1.50 per week.  She married a local man, Sanny in a traditional Paiute ceremony that took five days.  They had nine children, five of whom survived infancy. 

Jessie Annette Jack Hooper

Jessie Hooper was born November 8, 1865 in Winneshick County, Iowa.  She was a very frail and sickly child and was educated at home by a governess but in her late teens she traveled to Des Moins and Chicago to study art.

She met and fell in love and soon married Ben Hooper, an attorney, while visiting her sister in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.  Ben pursued a successful legal career and Jessie took up various civic projects, established the first kindergarten, the first visiting nurse program and a sanatorium for Tuberculosis patients.

She joined the Wisconsin Woman’s Suffrage Association and went on to become a renowned leader in the American Woman’s Suffrage Association frequently traveling to Washington to lobby for a federal suffrage amendment.  When Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, her efforts helped to make Wisconsin the first state to ratify it.  

In 1922 Jessie ran as a democrat for the U.S. Senate and while she realized that there was little hope of unsettling the incumbent, she felt it was her duty as a newly enfranchised woman, to make her voice heard and run for office.

Following WW I, Jessie devoted much of her energy to the peace movement making hundreds of speeches on behalf of world disarmament.  Three years before her death she joined women from around the world in presenting peace petitions with over eight million signatures to the League of Nations disarmament conference in Geneva.