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The stories in this illustrated memoir are as gritty and harrowing as you might expect, but there’s humor here, too, as well as compassion and tenderness."— New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2022 The highway, which links the Edmonton area to the oil sands plants north of Fort McMurray, has become infamous because of the high number of injuries and deaths on the narrow but busy roadway”. Beaton left Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton at age 21 for an oil boom spurting a wealth of high-paying jobs that she could use to pay off her student loans. The place she finds is full of life and also hostile to it; a cabdriver warns her that a “shadow population” of workers “live here, but they don’t live here.” As Beaton settles into daily life in a tool shop, she begins to understand how that transience changes people, as well as her own complicity in the wholesale destruction of Indigenous land.”—Emma Alpern, Vulture
Ducks - Penguin Books UK
Everything's ruined, our lives around our lands are ruined, our water, the air, everything.Their almighty dollar comes first. That's pretty sad. You can't eat money. It is such a tragic and relatable story… I don’t think I will be able to stop thinking about it for a long time. It doesn't evoke a sense of enjoyment, right? But I didn't know the details in any way. What I expected was to work for money that I should be grateful to have. And I never expected a corporation to treat me nicely, but I also didn't know exactly what I was stepping into."The author touches a bit upon the environmental impact of the oil sands, but her focus is predominantly on the human impact of living in isolation and being expendable... all to make a decent wage. While I hadn't heard of this before, I doubt I'll be forgetting about it. She is married to writer Morgan Murray. [40] She has two children. After living in New York and Toronto, Beaton now lives in Nova Scotia with her family. [41] Awards [ edit ] Year Immersion journalism in the form of a graphic narrative following a Syrian family on their immigration to America. D+Q to Publish Kate Beaton's Hark! A Vagrant". Drawn & Quarterly. 12 January 2011 . Retrieved 3 August 2011. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant webcomic was, to a certain brand of internet user, a very big deal. It was the sort of thing you would probably read if you also read The Toast and The Awl and Hyperbole and a Half (all of which, of course, I did): whimsical, sweetly ridiculous little sketches about Napoleon, the businesswomen of the 1980s, and the love between a pirate and his nemesis.
DUCKS | Kirkus Reviews DUCKS | Kirkus Reviews
This is probably not the sort of thing I would have imagined, but then you really have no idea what's going on in other people's lives, even – especially – when you think you know them over what wasn't yet called social media. At the same time as she was building up a loyal following on the internet, she was busy working off her student loans in the work camps of the Alberta oil sands. Kate Beaton and I are the same age, and we hit the indy comics scene at roughly the same time. Like everyone else in the world I became a fan of her work - the funny historical stuff and the (also funny, but serious too) autobio stuff. We made friends, another one of those weird internet friendships that feels both intangible and invaluable. Beaton's first children's book, The Princess and the Pony, was released in 2015. [33] In 2016, she published the picture book King Baby. The author does disclose that this is her story. Two years of her life subjected to misogynist behaviour. Assault, harassment; questioning her own identity. The loneliness from being isolated. The environmental erosion happening. Toxic in more ways than one.A graphic memoir recounting 2 years Beaton spent working at the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, far from her eastern coastal home of Nova Scotia. Her insistence on presenting her experiences as complicated and sometimes contradictory is one of the book's most compelling features. The people doing this environmentally devastating work aren't evil villains; they too are being exploited by the oil companies and have few other options for supporting themselves as blue collar workers. The men Beaton works with are suffering from isolation, terrible mental health conditions, the absolute jokes of workplace safety policies, and subsequent drug and alcohol (ab)use. Some of them are also perpetrators of rape, assault, and harassment. She is haunted by the uncertainty of how men she knows and loves would act trapped in such a toxic environment for so long. All these things are true at the same time. In 2016, this landscape prompted another news story when huge wildfires closed the town of Fort McMurray, which serviced the camps, underlining a bigger issue of environmental breakdown to which the oilfields contribute. But Beaton holds her focus on the two years she spent there, when her mettle was tested up to, and beyond, its limits by the more local threat of social and behavioural breakdown, which landed her in many difficult situations.
Ducks by Kate Beaton | CBC Books Read an excerpt from Ducks by Kate Beaton | CBC Books
a b c "Congratulations to the Harvey Award Recipients!". Archived from the original on 15 March 2016 . Retrieved 13 September 2012. To get Kate Beaton’s impressions on it as a woman is just priceless. That she would softly contrast her time in the workcamps with her regular life as an East Coaster added so much warmth to this book, for me. That she would avoid magnifying drama to focus instead on how she felt, one wound after the other, letting the realizations sink in, won me over, as well. The true heartache of this book lies in Kate’s struggles to keep her head above water amid financial woes, trauma and a never-ending battle with her conscience. Although she experienced conflict with several who drifted in and out of her life, she spoke highly of many of the relationships she forged with those who held her best interests in mind and helped her along the way. What makes this story so moving is that it's presented from a completely personal point of view. It's not a political screed or a take-down or an exposé (though it can't fail to have the effect of all of these in places). It's just her own experience as a woman living remotely in a place where people live in isolation, where workers and the environment are sacrificed to corporate exigencies, and where men outnumber women by about fifty to one.The run turned Roach from a recent University of Toronto grad and aspiring law student into a household name in Canada. In the afterword, Katie Beaton is incredibly generous sharing about her experience from working in the oil sands between the years 2005 to 2008–(for 2 years). Armistead, Claire (15 September 2022). " 'We had to leave home for a better future': Kate Beaton on the brutal, drug-filled reality of life in an oil camp". The Guardian . Retrieved 25 December 2022. At the cost of our lives-as long as they get their money. They don't care how many of us they kill off.’ I'm a Careful Person': An Interview with Kate Beaton - The Comics Journal". www.tcj.com. 4 November 2015 . Retrieved 10 February 2018.
Ducks by Kate Beaton | Waterstones
Beaton, Kate (28 February 2011). "My eulogy is, of course, contingent on the will". The New Yorker. Though the book is entirely from Beaton's perspective, there is significant subtext throughout, [4] and many moments in the story reflect larger movements in Canada around the environment, politics, culture, and economics surrounding the oil sands. [6] Beaton is a migrant worker; growing up in an economically depressed part of Canada, she understood that she would have to leave home to make money and repay her student debt. [2] She and many other workers are forced to take on difficult and undesirable jobs, and there are undertones of class resentment towards those who chastise oil sands workers while their economic standing shields them from making such a difficult compromise. [4] [2] Most of the other workers are men, outnumbering women 50-to-1. [7] Beaton is subjected to frequent sexual harassment, but because of her need to pay off her debt, she does not report others and continues to work. [4] [8] Best Books 2022: Publishers Weekly Publishers Weekly". Publishers Weekly . Retrieved 24 October 2022. Not an excuse, no. But it shows that people are shaped by their environment and, in a less than stellar one, might act in ways they normally wouldn't. She didn't demonize all men because of her experience there but at the same time she showed how women suffer in toxic male environments - and are expected to just "deal with it" and not complain.
The only message we got about a better future was that we had to leave home to have one. We did not question it, because this is the have-not region of a have-not province, and it has not boomed here in generations.”
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