Eaton Hamilton

the problem with being trans is cis people. The problem with being queer is straight people. The problem with being disabled is abled people. The problem with being Black is white people. In other words, prejudice.

Tag: cnf

01/15/2023

Ah, well, we seem to be half through the first month of 2023

painting by Eaton Hamilton, 2021, acrylic on paper, perhaps 11×14″

The weather has (happily) continued mild, and the dog seems finally to be more or less over her aversion to rain, which makes our walks infinitely more enjoyable. She has spied a couple deer and yesterday, a cat. She’s keen for the chase (but leashed).

In her past, I think she was forced to eat a lot of rotten food to stay alive, and so feeding her continues to be an issue. I’m sure she’d be happy with human fast food, somehow, but dog food is tricky for her. I have to make a “bread crumb” pathway for her to follow to her bowl, since once she sees it’s good, she’ll eat another and another little pile of it until she reaches her bowl where she’ll dig in. She does mean a lot of mopping; so much mopping that I just leave the mop and bucket out now.

This week, I’ve been painting in tones of black and white (and none of these are finished to show you). The black I concoct is very much like Payne’s Grey, so really tones of grey blues. It’s been fun to take on old family photos, but sometimes after all the monotone, I itch for colour. Still, there are things I’m trying to teach myself technically with my new water miscible paints, but also compositionally as my canvases go bigger.

Thanks to all my clients! I love and appreciate you all! I can say for certain there are more of my works on US walls than Canadian now. Funny that.

As for writing, I did get a handle on the first draft of an essay on a deadline I’ve been working to conceive. This week I’ll be banging at it to see if I can tap it into submittable shape. We’ll see. The gears feel like they need oil.

How are your artistic pursuits coming along? Are you making it through winter okay?

I notice here on the west coast that our bulbs are up, way up, and the O. poppies (orange) that were already here and that a “helper” tried to steal, whereupon shattering the dreadful roots into many plants, are already up and at ’em. They look tender as annuals at the moment. The robins are back! They’re such pests, re: berries, but I wish them well, because the barred owls are up in the tree limbs sharpening their nails (last September an owl killed a mother robin and three babies in one particularly bloodthirsty week).

Cheers to you all!

#AutisticArtist #FaceBlindness #AcylicArt #AcrylicPainting #MixedMedia #OilPainting #Drawing #FigurativeArt #Strength #Endurance #OnLineDrawing #LifeDrawing #Visual Art #PortraitsOfWomen #NonBinaryArt #PastelArt #transArt #AuthorsWhoPaint #PatreonHamiltonArt #ArtForSale #DisabledArt

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11/27/2022

Good afternoon, writers

ID: yt woman with red hair and blue shirt, profile

painting by Eaton Hamilton, acrylic

How was your week? I had a troublesome one after one of my kids got hurt in an accident, but I think now that she’s okay, so I’m standing down with an ever-vigilant eye.

Happy to say I finally wrestled my procrastination to the ground and am back working on novel revisions at the same time as my memoir. It’s good for me. Usually November is a great writing month, but this time around after all the housing shenanigans (which must continue in the spring … do everything you can not to become a disabled senior without much of a pension, because Canada doesn’t have a safety net for disabled people, but, instead, programs of eugenics) I was too exhausted to stand up. I don’t get rid of any disabilities simply because there’s need for me to do extra things, and I don’t have more money to fund those things either.

But making stories is a good way to pass the time. I love that feeling of finding someone’s character. Well, hello! I say when they announce themselves. Hello and where have you been all my life? It doesn’t even have to be a person I have anything in common with, or even someone I like or admire–they just have to have some pop and sizzle and I’m all theirs. Character-driven work writes itself. Maybe that’s why cnf will always come second in my heart.

How about on your side?

Meantime, support my literary and visual art endeavors at Patreon at Hamilton Art. For as little as $5/month, you can join me as I talk through writing and art dilemmas, joys and techniques. You can ask me any questions you like, and, if we can get a big enough group together, I’ll be happy to do mini-classes too. Let’s make the site together. Join me!

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07/17/2022

I Hate to Report…

painting: Eaton Hamilton 2021

…that I am no further along in unlocking the mystery (infrastructure) of this memoir than I was seven days ago, and not for lack of trying. It’s me that’s my impediment. I would give a lot, some days, to be a different writer with different skills, though then I’d likely pine for my original skills, right?

How are all y’all doing? It’s difficult with BA.5 on the romp, I know, since it’s our most infectious variant yet, and transmissible even outside–and how we want to be maskless outdoors! I suspect everything will worsen until governments realize the “let ‘er rip” plan is ruining lives, creating mass disability, wrecking the economy from record numbers of days-of-work lost, and put back in effective measures and education programs. We must protect ourselves from dirty air just the way we protect our water. We must get serious about cleaning our air!

Hope you manage to have safe and good weeks, folks.

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06/05/2022

Scrivener

Scrivener system software

Who uses this program? Who values it?

I use it and I value it, though even after years, I don’t understand it completely nor use it efficiently. I do love it, though, for the ease of bringing up alternate versions of the ms I’m working on, or other chapters, or research notes. Toggling through is intuitive in a way that Word just isn’t.

I’ve never used it to organize a poetry collection, but I think it would be useful. What do you think? Have you ever tried it for poetry?

What do you use it for?

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04/24/2022

CNF–dialogue, or no?

There’s been a lot of chatter on twitter about whether it’s okay to include dialogue in cnf. Some people have great recall for dialogue, some perfect. I have better than usual, myself, because of my face blindness. Ask me 30 seconds after seeing someone what they looked like or what they were wearing, and I generally couldn’t tell you, but ask me what someone said? Yes, I have excellent recall. Speech contains a lot of unspoken language, too, or sub-text, ones the speaker may not even be aware they’re using. Dialogue develops character in ways no other convention does. In my opinion, memoirs will suffer if there isn’t dialogue that is faithful to the emotional truth of the original convo.

Here is the start of a twitter thread you can search to join the discussion:

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03/27/2022

The first clue toward vivid writing

Do you wonder sometimes if writers you love, writers who come alive on the page, just have more innate gifts than you do? How do they get their sentences so crisp?

While I can’t answer for other writers, I know I spend a lot of time at the sentence level. You know those times when you need to cut 500 or 5000 words but you don’t want to change your story? Often, if you just take those words from the sentences, you’ll get where you’re going.

Here’s a sentence I wrote this year:

Our geese had begun to go after Scott as he toddled. 11 words.

Possible edit: The geese swarmed my brother. 5 words.

See what I did there? I made “had begun to go after” into “swarmed.” It’s more vivid. It uses fewer words. I excised the flab. So that’s what I’m always doing in editing. I look for words that aren’t necessary at the beginning and end of the sentence–and anywhere else inside it, too. I utilize more precise language. If it becomes shorter, that generally fits my purposes, whether or not that’s why I’m doing it. Besides sharpening your ms–putting it to the whetstone, if you will–this makes words fall off, and you’ll find yourself with a crisper, shorter manuscript at the end.

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01/09/2022

Scary times

oil stick painting by Eaton Hamilton 2018-2022

Omicron is raging and where I live, kids are going back to K-12 tomorrow without the proper mitigations to keep them safe. No HEPA filters, no CO2 monitors in every class, no N95 masks. It’s terrifying. At most, only partial vaccination status. Teachers too without N95s. I wish every one of them well.

Did I say I turfed my essay collection in Dec and decided to re-jig and re-write as a typical linear memoir? I’ve had a month with it now, and while I’ve had major health problems during this time, I manage to sit with the ms, now about 20K words, most days for at least a little while. That’s one of the benefits of being on perpetual lockdown, I guess, and it’s important to find satisfaction in that ugly situation where you can. So that’s me. Always a dollar short and a day late, but struggling along, doing my best.

I continue to be passionate about advocacy work and educating others about ableism, homophobia, transphobia, fat phobia and violence against women/enbies and children. I put a lot of time into twitter these days trying to undo some of the damage of government covid policies. BC is off the rails. I can’t get BC back on, but I can link to some of the people whose work very well could.

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12/26/2021

It’s been a great writing week; how about you?

painting by: Eaton Hamilton 2021; middle-aged Gertrude Stein

I don’t know if I mentioned this, but halfway through my memoir writing time, I decided to punt the book and start over. Something had been niggling at me for months, and that something was suggesting it wasn’t working. It finally barrelled to the front of my brain and I began over. I frequently do this with books, which is why I’ve written 3x more than I’ve tried to have published. I already have 10K words done. This week could be a washout, though, due to other challenges.

I hope your holidays were good ones. I don’t really celebrate Christmas, but this year is snowy and desperately cold and I’m certainly watching the weather, at least and hoping the power doesn’t go out. The wind just came up, one of the forecast gusts, I guess. Most of my time seems to be used bringing in hummingbird feeders to blow-dry them into thaw before setting them back out. The hummers–must be 20-30, all squabbling–are desperate.

As always you can follow daily paintings on IG at hamiltonart1000 and also join my Patreon for weekly chats on writing and painting (Hamilton Art)!

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12/19/2021

The New Outliers

please be in touch if this is your work

Lee Gutkind on the road to creative nonfiction at LitHub.

I would have liked to see this essay acknowledge the democratization of literature with the advent of the internet. Marginalized voices were, sometimes for the first time, able to add their voices to literature’s mix. We began to see lit from disabled, queer, trans, non-binary, autistic and biwoc folks. (I hate the word “confessional” applied to lit, as it transfers a sense of blame to authors for abuse, illness and so on. Most of the things that have gone awry for us are not our fault.)

Did you know that in order to get published, I had to enter and win literary contests? It was the only way I could get my pieces noticed, the only time my work was judged on merit rather than name and identity.

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06/28/2019

New essays up at Medium!

image by Jessica Poundstone for Gay Magazine

I’m moving some of my essays onto Medium for your reading pleasure! Here’s what’s there so far:

The Pleasure Scale, Gay Magazine, about how, as a near shut-in, I find pleasure

The Preludes to Assault, about a short encounter with Jian Ghomeshi, and sexual violence

The Nothing Between Your Legs, about my non-binary life as a girl in the 1950s; first published in Autostraddle

A Night of Art and Anti-Art, about a walk on beach one evening with Liz

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04/15/2017

“Never Call Yourself a Writer, and Other Rules for Writing”

 

Really, this is all you need to know to get started and keep going, by Shawna Kenney, from Brevity:

Never Call Yourself a Writer

 

 

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08/31/2015

CBC CNF longlist

Screen Shot 2015-08-31 at 12.31.21 PM

Happy to say that my piece “Battery” made it to this year’s CBC creative nonfiction shortlist. Sad to say that I had to withdraw it when it won Lit Pop. Congrats to everyone on the longlist and good luck to you all going forward!

 

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12/28/2014

The “ecstatic, shattered, staring beast” that pain makes of us

The Sunday Rumpus Essays are uniformly excellent writing about intriguing topics, and this week’s is no exception.  But it goes where most of us suffering with chronic pain fear to tread–into describing what it’s like to be sucked in and never back out of it.  Author Sonya Huber ‘s brilliant foray into metaphor:

The Lava Lamp of Pain

 

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12/08/2014

Felicitous Life and Karrie Higgins

JEHblackpaper7sketch by Jane Eaton Hamilton 2014

There’s a group on FB called Binders.  If I hadn’t joined Binders, I wouldn’t have had my essay Things That Didn’t Happen come out on Manifest Station.  If it hadn’t come out there, I wouldn’t have seen that Karrie Higgins’ brilliant essay Strange Flowers had come out there, too.  You should read it.  You shouldn’t go another day in your life without reading it or knowing that Karrie Higgins is writing some of the best prose seen today.

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