Author Kate Beaton discusses new graphic novel in Seattle town hall | Events

“Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” is a devastating, penetrating, and darkly funny graphic memoir chronicling the two years New York Times bestselling cartoonist Kate Beaton spent working in the oil sands. The all-consuming goal of paying off her student loans drove Beaton away from her beloved home in Nova Scotia to Alberta’s isolated boomtowns, ridden with drug problems and company camps where men outnumber women 50 to one.

Beaton visited Seattle on the evening of Nov. 3 to discuss the novel in conversation with essayist and critic Claire Dederer for Town Hall Seattle.

“We tell ourselves stories about who we are before we know who we are,” Beaton said in the opening presentation of the town hall.

“Ducks” is a class commentary, a complex portrait of misogyny and environmental destruction, and an odyssey. It’s also a love song to Beaton’s Cape Breton community. Despite the galvanizing force of the book’s vital political message, it’s the love song that haunts the entire epic narrative.

Though one might be tempted to classify “Ducks” as a coming-of-age story, it’s not so much the self that Beaton learns to embrace in the isolation of oil sands, but the stories that we tell about ourselves. These stories are home; they form the basis of our cultures and identities. They are the source and heartbeat of nostalgia. Yet, they are also, in Beaton’s case, and in the cases of many people from communities with a long tradition of exporting labor like Beaton’s own Cape Breton, what can lead us away from that home.

As Beaton writes in the graphic novel, “There is no knowing Cape Breton without knowing how deeply ingrained two diametrically opposed experiences are: a deep love for home, and the knowledge of how frequently we have to leave it to find work somewhere else.” Throughout the songs and stories of Cape Breton, which Beaton frequently draws upon in her presentation, the theme of leaving home to find work is everywhere.

Folk tunes, played by musician Peter MacInnis, permeate the opening presentation to Beaton’s town hall. Beaton herself begins the talk by singing a verse from a traditional song in Irish Gaelic about Cape Breton, written by one of her distant cousins.

A lyric from the music that Beaton returns to is “I have a desire to be with you again as I was, but I will never be the same.” This desperate conundrum is one of the main themes in Beaton’s own story.

The hero’s journey isn’t so much about going off on her own to find herself, as it is about trying to hold on to herself through grueling isolation. As Beaton notes in her talk, when she left Cape Breton for Alberta, she had no illusions that she would enjoy her time there. Instead, she was simply following the notion that had been drilled into her head since she was a child — that “any job is a good job.”

Cape Bretoners are deeply “aware of the rifts on the map.” For Beaton, there is no conflating the continent of America with a homogenous notion of America, as some of those of us living on the cosmopolitan West Coast of the United States have a tendency to do. By gently mocking the Americanness of her audience, she was sure to remind us that her story is a profoundly Canadian one.

Not only that, but despite being primarily set on the oil sands of Alberta, it’s a story about Cape Breton. First and foremost, “Ducks” is about the people of the Maritimes, the culturally rich, but economically disenfranchised eastern seaboard of Canada.

“Fort McMurray was a diverse place, but my experience was a very Atlantic Canadian one,” Beaton told the audience during her talk.

While working on the sands, she associated primarily with her own diasporic community. She is careful in acknowledging that her community is a white settler one, and she staunchly condemns the harm done to Indigenous people, especially by the oil companies, but she also recognized the diversity of and the inequities between white settler communities spread across the North American continent.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the memoir is the complexity of the portrayal of the men in the camps. These men are an omnipresent menace and a constant source of harassment, anxiety, and even violence. But Beaton has the courage and empathy to ask the question: what would the men she knew back home be like in this environment? Would they be the ones who pull over to the side of the road while she is walking home to ask if she wants a threesome, or would they be the ones who don’t do anything at all?

Beaton hints that the question “Ducks” poses, though deeply unsettling, could perhaps be reconciled through nostalgia. Maybe we are less ourselves when we are isolated from the stories we tell about ourselves, less ourselves when we are isolated from home?

“Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands” was released on Sept. 13 by publisher Drawn & Quarterly and can be purchased on their website.

Reach contributing writer Zinnia Hansen at [email protected]. Twitter: @HansenZinnia

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