Finding H.D.
Finding H.D. is a multi-year community exploration of the life and work of Bethlehem-born poet, memoirist and fiction writer, Hilda Doolittle, who published under the pen name H.D. Through a series of public humanities and public arts events, Finding H.D. has welcomed the people of Bethlehem and the broader Lehigh Valley into a process of discovering, together, the legacy of the most influential literary figure born in this community. H.D.’s innovative poetry and prose established her as a leader of the early 20th-century modernist literary movement and she is widely celebrated today as a queer, feminist visionary and eloquent advocate for peace. H.D. drew on experiences of her hometown throughout her long writing life and she remains one of the most perceptive interpreters of Bethlehem’s history. By searching for H.D., we seek to understand who we have been and who we hope to become as a community.
In 2018 and 2019, Finding H.D. organized public readings, lectures and colloquia, walking tours, and a concert, culminating in the world premiere of a mixed-media play, The Secret. In 2020, we unveiled at the Bethlehem Public Library a commissioned portrait of H.D. by local artist Angela Fraleigh and the library published a new edition of H.D.’s Sea Garden, with an introduction by Jennie Gilrain, Finding H.D.s lead organizer. We look forward in 2021 to an extension of our H.D. community reading group and to the launch of a Finding H.D. digital project, which will include scenes from The Secret, interviews with cast and creators, a documentary film and new creative projects by Bethlehem poets and artists inspired by the work of H.D.
Finding H.D. is a partnership of Bethlehem Area Public Library, Mock Turtle Marionette Theater, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center, South Side Initiative and the Lehigh University English Department.
Who Is H.D.?
Hilda Doolittle was born on Church Street in Bethlehem in 1886. She died in Zurich, Switzerland in 1961 and is buried in Bethlehem’s Nisky Hill cemetery, a few blocks from her childhood home. Publishing under the pen name H.D., she became one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. She published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, beginning with the imagist collection, Sea Garden (1916), which brought her an early international reputation. Her book-length feminist poems Trilogy (1946) and Helen in Egypt (1961) established her as one of the most ambitious poets of her generation, re-interpreting the long arc of Western culture, from its classical and Biblical foundations to the cataclysm of the Second World War. H.D. wrote several powerful memoirs, including The Gift (about her Bethlehem childhood) and Tribute to Freud (about her psychoanalysis with Freud in Vienna). Much of H.D.’s experimental fiction, including her autobiographical novel HERmione, explores her experience of bisexuality and has attracted much recent attention to H.D. as a queer literary pioneer. In 1960, the year before her death, H.D. was the first woman to be awarded the prestigious medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
H.D. and the City of Bethlehem: Why She Matters to Us
Hilda Doolittle’s roots in the city of Bethlehem ran deep. Her mother’s family were among the Moravian founders of the city in the middle of the 18th century. Her grandfather was a minister at Central Moravian Church and principal of the celebrated Moravian School for Girls, where both her grandmother and mother taught. H.D.’s uncle Frederick Wolle was the founder of the internationally renowned Bethlehem Bach Choir. H.D.’s family were among the founders of the Bethlehem Iron company (later Bethlehem Steel) and her father was the first professor of astronomy and mathematics at Lehigh University. H.D.’s family played a significant role in the city’s major institutions.
Although Hilda moved away from Bethlehem at the age of 10, she remained preoccupied with the city all her life. Especially during the 1940s, when H.D. was living in London during the terrifying aerial bombings of the Blitz, she wrote extensively about Bethlehem, in her memoirs, poetry and fiction. The memoir of her Bethlehem childhood, The Gift, remains one of the most perceptive interpretations of our city’s history. There, H.D. sought to understand how Bethlehem had evolved from a pacifist and egalitarian social experiment to a center of global armaments production. In her memoir and poems, she sought to retrieve the “gift” of equality and creativity that had been promised at the time of the city’s founding.
The organizers of Finding H.D. encourage the people of Bethlehem to embrace Hilda Doolittle as an inspiring foremother, a literary guide. We hope that generations of schoolchildren will see her portrait in the Public Library and want to learn more about this radiant literary spirit of our community. We hope that the exploration inaugurated by Finding H.D. will evolve in the years ahead, inspiring new generations to return to her work.
How Finding H.D. Was Born
In 2015, Mary Foltz, co-director of SSI, invited Lehigh humanities faculty and local artists to a series of dinner gatherings at the Lehigh Humanities Center to discuss public arts collaborations. At these high-spirited sessions, folks who had been collaborating for decades broke bread with relative newcomers, and we began to dream together about a range of possible projects. In 2016, Doug Roysdon, founder of Mock Turtle Marionette Theater, attended the local Bethlehem Women’s March and was inspired to create a play about a woman poet. Doug approached Mary Foltz and Seth Moglen, American literature professors at Lehigh, about collaborating on a play about Emily Dickinson. Mary and Seth suggested focusing on H.D. instead, because she was born in Bethlehem and her feminist vision emerged from local soil. Seth shared with Doug an article he was writing on this topic. Doug approached Jennie Gilrain, an actor and director with decades of experience in the creation of original community-based theater, about collaborating on a play about H.D. Jennie agreed and she insisted that, if the goal was to encourage our community to embrace H.D. as the literary patron saint of Bethlehem, we must engage people across the city in the research and creative process. We had to engage the whole community in the work of discovering Hilda Doolittle, her connection to this place, and the implications of her writing for our future. And so, Finding H.D. was born…
Finding H.D.: the First Two Years
Under the leadership of Jennie Gilrain, the Finding H.D. team organized a wide range of events to enable people across the city to learn about Hilda Doolittle’s life and engage her work.
Through a public reading at Bethlehem City Hall, people from all walks of life read H.D.’s writing and explained why her work has mattered in their lives.
Through a series of library talks, scholars and devotees helped diverse audiences appreciate H.D.’s influence on 20th-century literature, her capacity to help us think more capaciously about human sexuality, her family’s Moravian roots in the city, and the poet’s rich relationship to the natural world.
Through outdoor adventures, we helped our neighbors immerse themselves in H.D.’s beloved forests and cityscape.
At Lehigh’s Zoellner Auditorium, the distinguished composer Steven Sametz conducted an orchestral and choral performance of his musical settings for H.D.’s poetry.
In order to draw Bethlehem residents’ attention to H.D. for generations to come, the Bethlehem Area Public Library solicited proposals for a new professional portrait to be hung in the lobby of the main branch of the library, located next to City Hall and the former site of the poet’s childhood home. The Finding H.D. team selected local artist Angela Fraleigh’s proposal and BAPL unveiled her portrait in March 2020.
The library also published a new edition of Sea Garden (1916), H.D.’s first volume of poetry, which brought her an international reputation. The edition contains an introduction by Finding H.D.’s lead organizer, Jennie Gilrain.
The Secret
The first phase of Finding H.D. culminated in Oct. 2019 with the world premiere at Touchstone Theatre’s Festival UnBound of an original mixed-media play, The Secret, structured by Doug Roysdon, developed by the ensemble cast and directed by Jennie Gilrain.
The Secret explores central episodes of Hilda Doolittle’s life, from her Bethlehem girlhood to her terrifying years in London during the Blitz, drawing entirely from H.D.’s own memoirs, poetry and fiction. Director Jennie Gilrain led the play’s cast of eight actor-creator-composer-musicians through a year’s worth of improvisation with words, movement and music, including dramatic engagement with Roysdon’s spell-binding puppets of H.D., her beloved grandmother, a forest spirit, and a female lover evoked in H.D.s poetry. The creators of the play drew upon the insights of H.D. scholars and all those across the city who participated in the preceding year’s Finding H.D. events and conversations.
Through this collaboration of theater artists, musicians, puppeteers, scholars and community members, The Secret brought to life the vision of Hilda Doolittle, a child of Bethlehem who overcame the shaming and silencing of women in her own time in order to affirm a vision of gender and racial equality and the beauty of the natural world.
In a moving community forum following the play, called “Who Will Follow the Music?,” a panel of local women discussed inspirations and obstacles to women’s leadership today. The panelists ranged in age from teenagers to city elders and included a city councilwoman, a waitress and ER technician, a district judge, a school custodian, a literature professor, a high school student and cast member, a learning specialist, and a civil rights leader.
The Secret was named best play of 2019 in the Lehigh Valley Press.
The Future of Finding H.D.
The next phase of Finding H.D. will begin with a series of performances by local artists, working in a range of media, who have been inspired by the work of Hilda Doolittle. “Love Flows Down: A Young Composer’s Response to H.D. and Hildegarde” will feature Abriana Ferrari and members of the Bel Canto Youth Chorus of the Bach Choir of Bethlehem. “Radical Freedom: Poets on the Life and Work of H.D.” will feature poets Elynn Alexander, Katherine Falk, Sienna Mae Heath, Nanette Smith, and Cleveland Wall. “Painting H.D.” will include a lecture and slide show by portrait artist Angela Fraleigh on the process of creating her portrait of Hilda Doolittle for the Bethlehem Area Public Library. “Drawing as Thinking” will feature playwright, Doug Roysdon on the process of creating characters and story through the art of drawing. “Devising H.D.: A Community Conversation” will feature the actor-creator-composer-musicians who devised “The Secret.” Starting in 2021, the Finding H.D. team plans to extend the H.D. community reading group and will launch an ambitious digital project that will include filmed recreations of scenes from The Secret, interviews with cast and creators, and a documentary film about this journey of community discovery. We are dreaming, too, of a projection mapping project and experimenting with ways to write H.D.’s poetry into the urban landscape.
Publicity
Finding H.D., Exploration of Feminist Poet Kicks Off in Bethlehem – Morning Call Nov. 2018
Finding H.D. organizers on L.V Arts Salon – WDIY radio – Nov 2018
Exploring a Bethlehem-born Poet and Community – Morning Call Jan 2019
Finding H.D. – Past and Future Female Voices – Festival UnBound Jan 2019
Lehigh faculty and students on H.D. – LV Arts Salon WDIY radio March 2019
Library Portrait of H.D. Needs Our Help – Bethlehem Gadfly Aug. 2019
Bethlehem’s Great Native Artist Subject of New Play – Bethlehem Gadfly Sept. 2019
Mixed-Media Play, The Secret – Broadway World Oct. 2019
“The Secret”: Actors, Puppets, Musicians Explore Poet H.D. – Whitehall Coplay Press Oct. 2019
The Secret – South Side Arts District – Oct. 2019
Who Will Follow the Music? Panel Discussion (with video links) – Gadfly Oct. 2019
Festival UnBound Blends Lehigh Scholars with Community Artists – Oct 2019
“The Secret” Named Best Play of 2019 – Lehigh Valley Press Jan 2020
Project Partners
Bethlehem Area Public Library
Mock Turtle Marionette Theater
South Side Initiative
Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center
Lehigh University English Department, Literature & Social Justice Initiative
Special Thanks
Edge of the Woods Nursery
Little Pond Retreat Center
Production Credits for The Secret
Doug Roysdon, chief writer and puppet maker
Jennie Gilrain, director
Liam McKenna, head musician
Larry Lipkis, musical consultant
Ree Harrington, costume designer
Melpomene Katakalos, set designer
Ara Barlieb, lighting designer
Seth Moglen, historical and literary adviser
Lexi Behrens, board op and production stage manager
Music composed by: Liam McKenna, Abriana Ferrari, Aidan Gilrain-McKenna, William Reichard-Flynn, Kalyani Singh, Matilda Snyder, Tommy Gilchrist, and Grace Spruiell Hochella
Script devised by: Doug Roysdon, Jennie Gilrain, William Reichard-Flynn, Aidan Gilrain- McKenna, Matilda Snyder, Kalyani Singh, Liam McKenna, Abriana Ferrari, Madison Lederberger, Grace Spruiell Hochella, Tommy Gilchrist, and Seth Moglen
Performers:
Abriana Ferrari, actor-puppeteer-singer
Aidan Gilrain-Mckenna, actor-puppeteer-singer
Tommy Gilchrist, cello
Madison Lederberger, actor-puppeteer-singer
Liam McKenna, trumpet
William Reichard-Flynn, actor-puppeteer-singer
Matilda Snyder, actor-puppeteer-singer
Grace Spruiell Hochella, actor-singer, percussion harp
Panelists for Community Dialogue, “Who Will Follow the Music? Women’s Leadership – Inspirations and Obstacles:
Phyllis Alexander, Project Director for Leadership Without Limits Leadership Institute
Yalitza Corcino-Davis, Assistant Professor, Lehigh Carbon Community College
Abriana Ferrari, 10th grader and cast member & composer for The Secret
Mary Foltz, Associate Professor of English, Lehigh University
Nancy Matos-Gonzalez, Magisterial District Judge, Bethlehem, PA.
Margaret Kavanagh, head custodian, Freemansburg Elementary School
Emily Santana, waitress and ER technician at St Luke’s Scared Heart hospital
Paige Van Wirt, Bethlehem city councilwoman and physician
Jenny Gilrain (moderator), director, actor and 4th grade teacher, Freemansburg Elementary.
Library Talks and Community Explorations
Craig Atwood (Professor of Moravian Theology, Moravian College)
Liz Bradbury (Director of Training Institute, Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Center)
Gary DeLeo (Professor of Astronomy, Lehigh)
Mary Foltz (Associate Professor of English, Lehigh)
Anisa George, (Forest Therapy Guide)
Marilyn Hazleton (Poet)
Seth Moglen, (Professor of English, Lehigh)
Christine Roysdon (Lehigh University Library, retired)
Louise Schaefer (Horticulturalist, Edge of the Woods Native Plants Nursery)