I was nothing in his life but a short release from the boredom and loneliness endemic in camp life, but he was a major trauma in mine. 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.

DUCKS | Kirkus Reviews DUCKS | Kirkus Reviews

We all know these are bad times. Sometimes the forces buffeting the world–capitalism, globalism, white supremacy–seem like faceless unstoppable powers; other times the faces inflicting monstrous violence are all too human. They are the faces of politicians and CEOs, but also uncles and neighbors. It often feels like there are only two options: to tolerate the intolerable, or to be overwhelmed by anger and hate. Either option I move toward, something precious inside me gets lost. Ali, Nyala (2022-11-03). "Beaton's graphic novel memoir chronicles two tough years working in Alberta oil sands". Winnipeg Free Press . Retrieved 2022-11-07. 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”.It’s 8am in Nova Scotia when we talk, and Beaton’s eldest child is racing around in pyjamas, trying to escape her dad. “Potty-training: it’s a land of tears and devastation,” says Beaton, now 39, rolling her eyes.

Ducks by Kate Beaton | CBC Books Read an excerpt from Ducks by Kate Beaton | CBC Books

She wonders whether, if her father had needed to support his family by working on the oil sands, he would have found himself resocialized into one of the leering men who surround her, or whether he would have been one of the quiet ones who keeps his head down and says nothing. Given the right stimulus, it could probably have happened to almost anyone, she thinks. I learn that I can have opportunity or I can have home. I cannot have both, and either will always hurt.” This is her memoir of that experience, and it's a valuable document to have out there, quite aside from any entertainment value. I've met a few people who worked in the oil sands and it seems like such a remote and opaque world – I've never seen any other books set there, and I've been trying without success to find an excuse to go out there myself though work for years. In this "man's world", she put up with a whole lot of crap. It was terrible. At the same time, I appreciate how she points out that it was the place they were in and the circumstances that made the men act this way.The book is about big, complicated issues: economic exploitation, misogyny, the abuse and disregard of Indigenous land and people, class, education, upward mobility, labor, environmental destruction, sexual harassment and assault, toxic industrial waste, power, history, complicity, identity, loss, sacrifice, family, home. The ground the book covers is far too broad and in-depth to go into in one review. But Beaton touches on these myriad complex subjects gently. Everything is told through conversations she had or overheard. It's never didactic or ponderous. She lets us make the connections ourselves.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, Hardcover Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, Hardcover

P.S., Another reviewer, Seth T., notes that this book was expanded from a much shorter prototype originally published on Tumblr. Here is the URL if you are curious: 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. It’s hard to describe what I felt while reading this. First and foremost, of course, it was empathy and sadness for the main character, Beaton herself. The need to leave home is not necessarily one that is present for those in Ontario (and especially Toronto). I would be devastated if I were told that this was to be my reality. But another part of the sadness I experienced was due to the corner in which Beaton found herself. Needing to make money, pay student loans off, do something right now, versus putting up with the culture that is the norm in the oil sands – one of crass phrases, raunchy remarks, and full on sexual assault. It was grim. An ambitiously complex graphic narrative of a Nova Scotian woman’s experience working in the oil sands of Fort McMurray, Alberta. 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.Of Scottish descent, Beaton grew up with her three sisters in Mabou on the isle of Cape Breton. [2] She went to a small school for K–12, only having 23 people in her class. [3] She graduated from Mount Allison University in 2005 with a Bachelor of Arts in history and anthropology. [4] a b Hodge, Nathan (11 March 2009). "Web Comic Artist Redraws Military History". Danger Room. Wired.com . Retrieved 28 March 2009. Walking through the OPTI-Nexen camp at night, Kate hears a man playing guitar and singing a familiar maritime song alone in his room. Concerns about oil extraction's environmental pollution and impact on indigenous people are also brought up, but more as side notes needing more exploration.

Ducks by Kate Beaton | Waterstones

I think Beaton goes out of her way to note that many of the men didn't behave awfully and to rationalize the behavior of the rest by pointing out factors like the environment, the economy, mental health issues, and substance abuse, but some men are just shits looking for the opportunity to be shitty is the real takeaway. 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.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. Am I defending them? I don’t know, just, they are still my people. Even at their worst, they’re more mine than she is”. As one of a handful of women in a camp full of men, she was under constant threat of sexual assault. She’s keen not to give away the details. “I’ve always worried, putting this book out, that this would be what people took away from it the most, and then what it would be reduced to, because that’s what happens to women’s stories. Only then do they become ‘great,’” she says. “But I also hope to build empathy and fear; I want them to worry about my character being in a dangerous place, and feel as scared for her as I felt at the time. If readers know, off the bat, what is going to happen, it robs it of that power.” 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. Because she is so patient in setting up this context, the sexual and corporate politics emerge absolutely organically, without any sense of animus or agenda. This gives the book's lessons an incredible power, while stripping them of any dogma or point-scoring. In fact Beaton doesn't shy away from questioning her own complicity in the industry, and she also makes a point of stressing the numerous perfectly nice and reasonable people who also worked around her.