an interview with Jane Eaton Hamilton

CV2: As an award-winning writer, poet, children's writer, photographer and lesbian rights activist your creative life is full and diverse. How do all of these activities connect with your work as a poet? What would you say is the overriding desire that pulls everything together?

JEH: My creative life is diverse, it's true. I also sketch and of late even paint. But all creative pursuits, be it genre-switching within writing or something else, have certain similarities—one is to another like fingers are to forearms. I do not consider myself a poet, by the way. More of an accidental poet, in that I avoid writing poetry, though it comes out here and there like a milk drip from a leaky container.

My activism is another animal entirely. To continue the analogy, it's more like the hair on my head—there, part of me, but I don't perceive sensations through it. My quest for same-sex marriage rights is just something that needs to be done for the gay and lesbian community, and, in a profound sense, for Canadians in general so that all of us will be able to say we live in a country where citizens are equal under the law. Joy and I work very consciously to build bridges between divergent communities. While the activism that gets me there is a political statement, on the other hand my marriage, the day I wed the woman I love a second after midnight on the day this country allows it, will be a deeply significant personal event. Will it generate poetry? It likely will.