Official Website
Darlene Artell (m. Hartman)
Born December 23, 1934 (age 75)
Melville, Louisiana
Occupation Novelist, screenwriter, short story writer
Nationality American
Genres Science fiction, mainstream, religious, humor
Notable All the Gods of Eisernon, Victory, The TrumpetsWork(s) of Tagan__________________________________________________________Influences:Greek and Roman myths; Star Trek TV series; Classic Italian, African and Irish Myths; spoken histories; Ray Bradbury; Mark Twain __________________________________________________________Influenced:Someone? No one? Heaven only knows!__________________________________________________________Signature:
BeginningsHartman was born during the last half of the Great Depression, in Melville, Louisiana...a little town in the middle of the Atchafalaya Swamp...to an Austrian-Italian mother and a Sicilian-American father, who supported an extended family of eleven people by selling newspapers, selling belt-buckles door-to-door, and hauling sunken cypress boles out of the swamp on his shoulders. He also wrote regularly for an Italian-language newspaper.
In 1936, he moved his wife and infant daughter to New Orleans, and became hugely successful as a dental salesman. At the same time, Hartman’s mother, a dedicated film buff, took her to the movies nightly, and she often watched the same film three or four times until the program changed. Afterward, her mother and she would ‘dissect’ the film, and discuss...even at that young age...what made it a good, or awful, film. Her mother was also a classic mythology fan, and would compare the films to the basic mythological form.
Her ancestor, Phillipo Artale, was knighted in Sicily for writing the first definitive history of that country, and made Baron of the two cities of Foggia and Ferrata. During WWll, her family came under verbal and physical attack for being ‘related to the enemy.’
Hartman, a disabled child, was mainly homeschooled, and so had the advantage of being able to travel with her parents throughout her father’s broad sales territory, surrounded by pillows, her father’s medical school books, and the then-standard schoolbooks. She attended school a day or a week at a time wherever they happened to be, and always led her class, and in 1947, when the family settled again in New Orleans, she was much in demand as a children’s tutor.
During her frequent hospital stays, she ‘brainpicked’ the doctors, nurses, and technicians, and supplemented that knowledge in every library she could find. She devoured her father’s medical books as well as her mother’s classical library. Her central character, Dao Marik, from the ‘Einai’ series of science-fiction novels, is based on a combination of several of her favorite physicians, and influenced by her own hospital experiences. The jungle-like setting of her planet, ‘Eisernon,’ corresponds closely to her beloved south Louisiana terrain.Hartman graduated from Annunciation High School, a business school, because her family were unable to send her to a college prep school. She attended Loyola University of the South (now Loyola University New Orleans) in a Pre-Medical program, but the rigors of the course, as well as its physical demands, broke her health, and her father and doctors demanded she drop out.
Hartman has been an avid reader and writer throughout her lifetime, and admits that she will read everything and anything, “including the labels on cans.” She continued to study on her own, and after some time met and married Al Hartman, whom she married on April 16, 1955, and with whom she had their first six children. She had always written and published, but began writing seriously when, after her marriage, she was confined to a wheelchair while expecting and raising her children.
In 1964, her mother sent her a diocesan newspaper in which the Franciscan priests at ‘The Hour of St. Francis’, then the largest private studio west of the Mississippi, were asking for submissions of half-hour film scripts. She sent her husband to the library for a “How to Write for Television” book, memorized it, and wrote several half-hour scripts, all of which sold to “The Hour.” It was her first paying job as a writer, for which she received $200 per script.
In 1965, she was asked to write a script celebrating the Civil War. She responded that she was a Southerner, and did not celebrate that particular unpleasantness, and hung up. They called back immediately and asked if she would write a half-hour piece about peace, to which she gladly assented. She wrote her script, “Victory,” which introduced a young Jack Nicholson and won the Gabriel Award for 1967, as well as gaining her attention from Combat, The Fugitive, and the Star Trek television series, for which she wrote five scripts and was asked to join the staff and to come immediately to Los Angeles.
Hartman and Gene Roddenberry had carried on extensive phone discussions centering around the cencept of a ‘spinoff’ from Star Trek, tentatively titled, ‘Hopeship.’ One of Hartman’s characters, a doctor named Joseph Mbenga, was to have been the brother of Simon Mbenga, Executive officer of the ‘good ship Hope’ in space, and had made a brief appearance in an episode. Because of these plans, Hartman’s scripts (and the novels she eventually made of them) bear resemblance to Star Trek at Gene Roddenberry’s request.
A sudden, serious relapse required hospitalization, which negated the ‘on staff’ position she had verbally accepted at the series. Her script ‘Shol’ was bought and then shelved when Gulf and Western took over Desilu and decided to go in another direction.
Undaunted, she published short stories, articles, plays, and magazine covers, and published her first novels, “All the Gods of Eisernon” (Avon Books,1973) and “The Elluvon Gift” (Avon Books, 1975), both based on her Star Trek scripts.
Meanwhile, Hartman and her husband adopted fourteen additional children, each of them handicapped in some way. She continued writing and published “The Trumpets of Tagan” (Ace Books, 1991), “Timeslide” (which was heavily based on her father’s failed attempt to stop a double lynching, when she was twelve) Ace Books, 1992), and “Hopeship” (Ace Books, 1993). She has three books in progress: “Gusto,” “Chains of Her Own Forging,” and a mainstream novel, “Choices”, as well as a film.
Meanwhile, Hartman and her husband adopted fourteen more children and were medical foster parents to half-a-dozen more.The Hartman family lived in New Orleans and in Orange County, California while the first six children were being brought up, and the children had access to film editors, producers, directors and a whole list of films, which were shown them while Hartman was in story conferences or planning sessions at ‘The Hour of St. Francis.”
Consequently, one of them became and Independent filmmaker (h2films.com); another graduated in costume design; yet another is a writer; and another an artist. A son, Kip, is the founder of the WAVE Awards, which honor Excellence in Wireless Communication for Apps and Entertainment; and the eldest, Mark, is a computer consultant to the U. S. Navy.
About her education and young life, Hartman says, “It was the most wonderful life you can imagine. My father would be traveling along a country road and would suddenly stop the car. “Darlene,” he would say, “look at that meadow over there; the trees behind it.” Excited, I would study it as intently as possible, knowing what was coming. “Now shut your eyes, and tell me how many shades of green there were, and what their names are.” And I would start, “I saw eleven: forest green, lime green, jade green, emerald” and on and on until I ran out and he picked up the litany.
My mother could break toothpicks, arrange them on a plate, and drop one drop of water on them, and a star would form itself. I was always amazed at that as a small child. I didn’t know that there were stars in toothpicks! I never knew that plain everyday matches could be made to kiss! There was Wonder and Magic all around, and they kept showing me how many fantastic things hid in the Commonplace. I wouldn’t change it for the world!“Actually, I think if you teach any ordinary child to read very early...I started at three...and turn him loose in a library, he’ll give himself a college education...with the possible exception of maths. Someone has to teach them about maths. But everything else?...introduce them to libraries and let them go! They’ll eat it all up and beg for more!”
