Jane Eaton Hamilton

BIOGRAPHY

FAQs

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Biography

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the author of six books shortlisted for several literary awards including the BC Book Prize, The VanCity Book Award, the Pat Lowther Award, and, most recently, for her short story collection Hunger, the Ferro-Grumley Award for the best lesbian book of 2002 (also longlisted for the Lambda). She is also a photographer and her photography sites may be reached from the home page by clicking "Photography".

Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Maclean's, Canadian Gardening, Fine Gardening, Macleans, and Seventeen magazine as well as in numerous anthologies, and has won the Yellow Silk fiction award, the Paragraph fiction award, the Event non-fiction award, first prize in the Prism International fiction award (twice), the Belles Lettres essay award, the This Magazine fiction award, The Grain non-fiction award and The Canadian Poetry Chapbook Contest. As well, her story The Lost Boy took the $6000 first prize in the 2003 CBC Literary Awards and was broadcast on CBC Radio's Between the Covers April 12 2004, and her story Social Discourse: 1944 from the Missouri Review was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Her stories "Graduation" and "Territory" have appeared in the Journey Prize Anthology; her story "Goombay Smash" appeared in Best Canadian Short Stories. Hamilton's story "How to Have Heart Disease (Without Really Trying)" was cited as distinguished in the Best American Short Stories. Her story "Death in One Another's Arms" was cited in the Pushcart Prizes.

Her work has recently appeared in "The Spirit of Writing: Classic and Contemporary Essays Celebrating the Writing Life" edited by Mark Robert Waldman (Penguin Canada) and in The Writer's Presence 4e (Bedford/St. Martin's 2003) along with other US high school texts. It has also appeared in Fine Gardening, the Missouri Review and twice in the New Quarterly including as part of the Bad Men Who Love Jesus issue, and is recently out in Fine Gardening and the Alaska Quarterly Review.

She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC (where she worked in the World Trade Towers while briefly attending NYU), Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver with her wife, Joy Masuhara, and their two daughters, Sarah and Meghann, both of whom are now settled into lives of their own. Meg lives nearby, but Sarah, after four years teaching in Japan, is now a grad student in Ontario. In her free time, Hamilton dances and sketches. She is a Master Gardener and writes the sporadic gardening column The Adequate Gardener for icangarden.com and yougrowgirl.com.

She and her wife were litigants in the same-sex marriage court case in Canada and were intervenors in the reference that went before Canada's Supreme Court in October 2004.

Frequently Asked Questions

I heard that you've left writing. Is it true?

It was rather like pulling off a limb without any anesthetic, but yes, it's true. I thought I was a lifer, but when I examined my life in my late forties, and saw how deliciously happy I was in my relationship and my non-working life, I couldn't fail to notice that I wasn't as happy going to my desk every day. Of course there were always the incandescent moments--the beautiful paragraph, the heady acceptance, but overall, no, it was not working. Menopause had played havoc on my ability to read and concentrate, and the dunning rejections kept coming. After a long contemplation, and much mourning and sadness, I quit January 1st, 2004. Six days later I heard that I had won first prize in the CBC Literary Awards, after something like 25 years running in the finals. It did not change my mind.

How has photography been for you?

With literature I was constantly encountering and winding my way through intriguing subjects and dilemmas, and even if most of them were fictional "what-if's", there was still real meaning there, whereas I find photography a little vapid, on the whole. I have always cared deeply, though, about colour and balance and design, and it is an endless pleasure being around beauty continually. As well, it is such an honour to be invited in to people's most treasured personal celebrations such as pregnancy, birth, infancy, birthdays and weddings.

I love, love, love photography. It's a gift to me. It's fun and easy and endlessly rewarding, unlike the crabbed and stunted literary world. It is a friendly, collegial, welcoming place.

To make it more meaningful, I have begun to volunteer for the wonderful organization Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep, which sends out photographers to take photographs when parents are losing, or have lost, a newborn baby.

As well, I do a lot of travel photography, which after youthful intentions to become an ethnologist, fulfills a longstanding and unrealized need in me.

Lastly, I am focussing in on some social, community projects, so do keep checking my blog which you can link to from my photo sites for more details.

Do you think you will get back to writing?

If I had the time, I think I would be writing again. I've written a few Adequate Gardener columns of late, and a couple essays to accompany photography submissions, so it's possible. Menopause is losing a little of its long grip. If I could find the time, I would probably try to gather all my unpublished stories together for another book.

Where can I find your latest book?

Only in Canada through your local bookstore, or online through ChaptersIndigo.ca or Bolen Books. If it's not in stock, ask them to order it for you. If any bookstore tellsl you it's unavailable, they are wrong. Insist. The ISBN for the paperback is 0778012034 and for the hardcover, 0778012026.

If I buy it, will you sign it?

If you send it to me at 74056 Hillcrest Park PO, Vancouver BC Canada V5V 5C8, yes, I will sign it. Please include $10 so I can repackage it and pay for return postage. Please indicate your return address clearly, and all the information about the inscription you want. Give me three weeks to get it back to you. If it's more urgent, send me an email and we can make other arrangements.

Do you do public readings?

Yes, although rarely. Contact my agent Maria Massie at Witherspoon Associates in NY at 212-337-2045 maria@lmqlit.com, or write to me.

Will you come read for us? We can't afford to pay you.

Unless it's a benefit for a cause I support (and even then, not always), no. I charge a reading fee and all expenses including accommodation, travel and meals.

Will you answer our questions about the book?

Yes, happily. Just send them in. Write me at jane@janeeatonhamilton.com. If I have not answered your question(s) within a few weeks, drop a line reminding me.

What is the deal with your name?

I was born Jane, but I was always called Janie and when I was in my mid-twenties, just moved to Vancouver, I’d had enough. A friend suggested Jenny. I said the point wasn’t to get a nickname, it was to be called Jane--plain Jane. But he insisted on Jena, a simple manipulation of vowels, which he considered a compromise. And because I was new to the city and he was the one introducing me around, Jena stuck. Now good friends call me Jena.

Originally, I decided to write under my initials. Not because, as some people assumed, I wanted to be mistaken for a man, but because I couldn’t bring myself to write under Jena, a nickname, yet there was already a quite prominent Jane Hamilton writing in the US. So J. A. Hamilton I became.

But I hit a snag. When my first book was coming out, ostensibly under J. A. Hamilton, my editor abruptly left the press mid-process and I never saw the galleys for the cover. It came out under Jena Hamilton. I could have shot somebody, especially because that was thereafter how I was listed in official records.

In the early nineties I was researching family history and got to know quite a bit about my maternal great grandmother, my namesake, a woman named Jane Tweedle Eaton. So I decided in her honour to officially go back to Jane, but to also add Eaton to distinguish me from the US writer named Jane Hamilton. But it has been like starting all over again. Now few people realize I'm the author who wrote July Nights, Body Rain and Steam-Cleaning Love.

Since then, other Jane Hamiltons have emerged in the fiction field. As well, there is a porn star in Europe called Sarah Jane Hamilton whose mail I occasionally receive, and a sculptor on Vancouver Island. I think we should all get together on a panel some day called Being Jane Hamilton.

You have two books of poetry. When will we see another one?

I'm just preparing one for submission called Going Santa Fe.

You’re a lesbian? But you don’t always write lesbian stories.

Eek! I’m a lesbian? Don’t tell my wife.

It's a good life if you can wade your way ithrough the sludge of constant homophobia.

When it comes to composing stories or novels, though, I’m not a lesbian or straight or striped purple. I’m whatever my narrator is. This can be, and often is, a heterosexual man. This can be a straight woman. This is often a lesbian. Old, young: doesn’t matter to me. All I care about is a voice that’s strong enough to carry me through five or six or eight thousand words--or a hundred thousand in the case of a novel--and that they’ve got a compelling story to tell. I don’t care who my character is or what he or she represents, other than a slice of humanity.

I am a dyke writer, but I only sometimes write lesbian content, and I am always a literary writer (except when I'm not).

Who are your favourite writers?

It's a sticky question. I read and admire widely. I can tell you a few of my favourite all-time short stories, though. If you haven't read them, I urge you to look them up:

Raymond Carver, Cathedral
Cynthia Ozick, The Shawl
Shirley Jackson, The Lottery
Richard Ford, Rock Springs
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Ethan Canin, The Year of Getting to Know Us
Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
Tillie Olsen, I Stand Here Ironing
Eudora Welty, A Worn Path
Lorrie Moore, People Like That Are the Only People Here

My favourite short story ever is by Russell Banks and is called Sarah Cole: A Type of Love Story.

That’s my goal, of course: To write just one damn story as knock-down gorgeous as Sarah Cole. I will be at it a long time. What gets me are stories that catch in the throat. Ones that open your life like the deepest breath you've ever taken and then slap that breath back out of you, hard, and leave you gasping.

What are you reading now?

I'm reading my happy way through Susan Orleans now, having been bowled over by The Orchid Thief (as I'm certain most gardeners would be).

My current favourite is We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver. Read this book. It is accomplished. Mothers Who Think, indeed.

Would you be willing to edit my work?

I do editing sometimes, but I prefer not to. I can heartily recommend the folks at Iowa Book Doctors at iowabookdoctors@aol.com, though they're expensive for Canadians with our sagging dollar. Periodicals like Quill and Quire in Canada or Poets and Writers in the US do advertise editors in their classifieds.

What material on your web site am I free to use?

These are copyrighted materials, but you can use them for research/academic/fair media use, including excerpts, unless I didn't write them, in which case you’d need to ask the author. The only thing I am sensitive about is getting credit, and I also like getting copies for my archives.

For wider or commercial use, please inquire.

Copying/use of photographs of me is fine; of other people, you'll have to ask them. Copying/use of gallery photography is prohibited without express written consent.

Jane Eaton Hamilton
photo Joy Masuhara 1999