kate beaton ducks two years in the oil sands

She revisited scores of old letters and emails and photos to jog her memory, and talked to dozens of colleagues and co-workers at the camps to gather their side of things and get their permission to write about them (many names in the book were changed). “When someone would ask me about Fort McMurray, I would start talking, and they’d be like, ‘Please stop talking!’ They didn’t want to hear it.”īeaton began working on “Ducks” in 2016. At the oil sands, Beaton entered an environment where male workers routinely leered at women, and worse many thought nothing of discussing women’s bodies, including hers, at work. “Very sharp, very witty, very observant, one of those people who could make really funny observations about a room or a party.” The two lived in the same dorm and worked together at the school newspaper, with Bird as a photo editor and Beaton on the comics page. “I never saw anime or Sailor Moon,” she said, “so I couldn’t have copied that style even if I wanted to.”Īfter high school, she enrolled at Mount Allison University, where she met Lindsay Bird, a religious studies major. Growing up in a comics and animation vacuum, Beaton developed a cartooning style and sense of comic timing all her own. “She was always drawing and doodling, before she even started school,” said Marion Beaton, Kate’s mother, who makes several appearances in “Ducks.” “She was always doing something creative.” So I was just picking up whatever rolled my way.”īeaton filled her time drawing. “We just didn’t have the same access to a bunch of stuff as other people. “I don’t want to make it sound like I lived in a garbage can,” she said with a laugh. “All of the books would smell weird, because they were like 200 years old.” As for online resources, Beaton had access to the internet a couple of times a week, in her school’s “internet class.” It seemed like a book I was always going to make, or it would be the one that would always be sort of swimming in my brain.” “A lot of my time in the oil sands was like that.

“You know how some times in your life, some memories, stay there and replay themselves?” she asked. It also gave her an insider’s view into a place and piece of Canadian history few outsiders ever see. 13 from the Montreal-based publisher Drawn & Quarterly, was one of isolation and sexual harassment. Her experience there, detailed in the graphic memoir “Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands,” out on Sept. So she headed west, to the tar sand fields of northern Alberta, one of the world’s most environmentally destructive oil operations, where workers lived in barracks-like camps and men vastly outnumbered women. Around her home in Cape Breton, a picturesque, wooded island in Nova Scotia, the joke was that everyone was “on pogie,” she said - on unemployment. In 2005, Kate Beaton was 21, with a brand-new degree in history and anthropology, student loans she said felt like a foot on her neck, and few job prospects.

Kate beaton ducks two years in the oil sands