RaeAnn Hartman

Welcome to my introductory blog post at my new site! I am thrilled to have a space to share my creative non-fiction, personal essay, and memoir musings – my source of energy, renewal, catharsis, and creativity. In my youngest years, I loved language arts, as it was called back in the 70’s, shining in public speaking contests, spelling bees, library reading challenges, fully embraced by all facets of reading and writing. I was a child of book mobiles, a mobile portable library moving between neighborhoods before public libraries were as accessible as today. Thankfully my parents supported a love of reading and took us every Thursday evening to return, renew and retrieve books. I still remember climbing up the metal trailer steps and meeting a mix of new and old book smells. It was glorious! Not just the smells, and the books, but the power of a library card.

As a teenager, I wrote poems to my first loves and have no doubt the dramatic, enthusiastic English teachers were the reason Chaucer, Shakespeare, and many great novels made sense and came to life. Those teachers’ capacities to engage a teenage brain to learn critical analyses was outstanding. Making the learning fun was natural for them and I am both retrospectively and eternally grateful. I did not know what great teaching I was taking for granted.

In University, my writing turned to academic and technical.  However, I was dating a wonderful, sensitive soul who shared my love of reading and writing, buying me gifts like Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, and other iconic publications reflecting a love of language. I continued to have opportunities for public speaking – valedictory speeches, friends’ weddings, debates, panels, student councils. I found words that worked and was trusted to not go rogue and keep it classy.

In my early career and marriage, I turned to journaling, particularly for travelling and world adventures before my children were born. The world stage as a landscape for beauty, timely stories, and wonderment is a dynamic opportunity. Once my children were born, I continued journaling, for sanity, clarity in a day, and to maintain a piece of myself, once consumed by little hands, hearts, and responsibility. Capturing as many moments as possible knowing they were time limited offers was important to me. Twenty-five years on I would never remember those nuances of a particular minute, hour, or conversation as deeply as I could in the moment. I suppose I am an archivist at heart, cataloguing and recording those fleeting times.

In many instances, a particular experience lives on in my journals. The trauma my son experienced when he heard someone in kindergarten say ‘hate’ for the first time. We needed to debrief for days! His family values had already taught him the word was akin to swearing, so his little ears almost bled hearing it, thus the debrief and conversations of how families differ. So much in my journals as a young family life is either sweet and sentimental, or annoying and frustrating. However, witnessing this bittersweet co-existence without me losing my mind or myself is the exceptional pleasure I have reading my journals all these years later. It was real. I don’t have to rely on a myth or memory. It’s in writing and transports me back to the minute, hour, or conversation.

Fast forward to my Master’s degree and I transitioned to morning pages as Julie Cameron describes in The Artist’s Way. Less about family, more about me. Stream of consciousness release before the day unfolds. It was truly about the present. What was I thinking, doing, planning, or reflecting on any given morning? It was a brilliant strategy that worked for me, de-cluttering my brain, still writing for sanity and clarity. Process out the unnecessary and process in new goals, ideas, and more importantly, creativity. The intention of morning pages is real. It set the tone for the next decade as my writing turned to extreme overload of the non-creative – a thesis, reports, studies, abstracts, thousands of e-mails, proofreading, evaluating, utilizing APA, MLA – a cacophony of style overdrive! Don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of the Oxford comma and grammatical correctness.  Marking student essays was a completely different beast. Although confusing homonyms are amusing, they got less and less funny the more I encountered them. To, too, two…there, their, they’re…weather, whether…role, roll. Don’t even get me started with its and it’s. Apostrophes and contractions are for another post. C’mon people! We live in the era of google, spellcheck, and blue or red squiggly lines in Word – all prompts I did not grow up with. As one of my former students, if you received an A+, bravo. Your essay was a proofed, edited, work of art, and just about everybody got there by the time they graduated. Learning takes time. However, as I realized effect and affect were kicking me to the curb, I needed a passageway to further my creativity. An escape from micro managing style.

The exit to furthering my creative brain presented itself while in the thick of my academic career, through a major life transition. The transition itself was my catalyst for storytelling idea after idea after idea. While journaling was still saving my soul at this time, archiving feelings, events, conversations, and questions, I realized my processing and catharsis held a ton of juicy stuff you just can’t make up…or could I? Life imitates art. I started working on my novel.

Workshops, writing courses, webinars became my go to as I honed crafting my novel. This is my year to finish and I can’t wait to share it. While my novel is the work in progress, I am thrilled to share this space with other musings emerging from my writing for you to enjoy.

I will share a Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall piece of writing with you this year and you are invited to visit, subscribe, and follow my blog as you wish. You are also invited to comment and ask questions in my contact space – feedback is gold and I love it! 

Catching some Raes is my punny homage to my mom, who passed away 10 years ago. When I was young, she often called me ‘her little ray of sunshine’, which stuck as a family trope. I dedicate Purseonification to her– a personal essay written for her and about her.