Roundtable: Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

An illustrated four panel comic sequence. In the first panel, a woman talks to another woman asking, "Hi! I'm new--I'm not sure who I'm looking for..." In the second panel, she receives a response that says, "Where's you PPE? You need a hard hat!" In the third panel, the woman, wearing a sweater over a collared shirt, says, "Um", and she wears personal protective equipment in the fourth panel.

Here at WWAC, we’ve been fans of Kate Beaton for a long time, so we were especially excited for the publication of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, Beaton’s highly anticipated memoir of her time working in the isolated Alberta oil-mining camps. At over 400 pages of Beaton’s distinctive intimate and emotional style, Ducks is a remarkable addition to the graphic memoir genre, at turns hilarious and heartbreaking, telling a story I, personally, had never known. WWAC-ers Elvie, Emily, and Masha gathered to discuss its features and impact.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands

Kate Beaton
Drawn & Quarterly
September 13, 2022

An illustrated cover for a book titled, "Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands", accompanied by bottom text that reads, "By the New York Times #1 bestselling author Kate Beaton". The illustration is monochromatic, depicting a young woman wearing personal protective equipment standing on a staircase hanging off giant vehicle. Her back is to the viewer and is looking towards a shoreline and formation of cliffs in the background.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands introduces Katie graduating from college and making the tough decision to work far away from her comfortable but impoverished home town. She goes to isolated mining camps in Alberta to pay off her student loans as quickly as possible. Her experiences there, in a bleak and unfriendly environment where men outnumber women drastically, [Kat, I changed this phrasing based on a tweet from Kate Beaton about how reviewers were taking the 50-1 ratio way too seriously]  and almost everyone is displaced, are the subject of the memoir.

What were your overall impressions?

Emily: This book is long, and spans years — though the setting feels bleak and unchanging at times, the pacing is nicely varied. There are pages that amusingly convey tedium and pages that refreshingly offer sweeping landscape spreads interspersed with tense scenes of how hard life is at the camps. Early after her arrival to Alberta, a series of one page anecdotes — getting mistaken for a hooker, getting hit on at work, etc., have an effect like a montage — time is passing and Katie is amassing experiences of this life.

Masha: Beaton is an incredible cartoonist, and one of the first things that captured my attention with Ducks is just how powerfully she can communicate complex emotions and expressions with incredibly economical, stylized lines. Two dots and a nose are all she needs to very clearly express frustration, or blankness in the face of an absurd situation, and not everyone can do that. The events of her past are mostly presented without narration or internal monologue, but Katie’s feelings and reactions to the situations she ends up in are clear even without dialogue because of the facial expressions and body language she uses.

Emily: That’s a big draw to Beaton’s work in general, I think. Her expressiveness and economy of line.

Elvie: Initially, I had a difficult time getting used to reading the book. I thought perhaps, maybe I didn’t like this pacing? There was nothing wrong with this work, no—but maybe, this comic was simply just not for me? And then it suddenly hit me: It’s supposed to be difficult. We, the reader, are experiencing the repetitiveness and overall repetition ad nauseam of what Katie very much had been experiencing in her day-to-day life working at the camps—and it’s frustrating! It really recreates the tiresome feel of the routine of the tasks she had to do on top of enduring scary, hostile interactions from all the men around her that seem to never stop.

It’s definitely an interesting choice to convey the story this way, working well with Beaton’s usual approaches as seen in her past work, which usually consist of self-contained skits and segments constrained within several panels. In Ducks, this fragmenting is as if we are peering in, mid-conversation, vignettes of vague memories and generally unclear moments that all pin to a specific point in time—but where it all goes, is even unclear to Beaton.

An illustrated two panel comic sequence. In the first panel, a young woman hangs over the wooden fence of a horse ranch. She says, "I learn that I can have opportunity or I can have home. I cannot have both, and either will always hurt." In the second panel, she is wearing a graduation gown and cap at the bottom of a flight of stairs. She says, "I learn, by twenty-one, that any job is a good job. Even a bad job is a good job; you're lucky to have it."

Let’s talk about how gender and class issues are front and center.

Emily: Katie is there to pay off college loans, and in fact, everyone there is there because they need to make money and economic opportunities are fewer elsewhere. That shared economic class awareness was definitely emphasized, even though people’s politics and education levels were definitely varied.

Emily: One note about genre – I think this says a lot about the plot arcs in the memoirs I’m used to! There are various anecdotes about many of the men’s lack of education – one about a nice guy who can’t read page 309 — if this was another kind of memoir, I’d expect the following several pages to be about Katie helping him to get better at reading and becoming friends in the process but this isn’t that. This isn’t a memoir from the perspective of a savior figure, this is just about everybody in a shit situation doing their best to survive.

Masha: I like the way she presents different situations, if that makes sense. Like, something happens, and it’s shocking or uncomfortable or otherwise unpleasant, and sometimes Katie has to stand up for herself or talk to her friends about it later, but a lot of the times she just silently experiences the unpleasant thing, and as the story continues the reader can really feel the toll all of the discrete unpleasant situations take on her as they continue adding up.

Emily: With that implied shared purpose of being there for the money, the gender and race problems are really highlighted. It’s a very white male world, in which the few women are seen as objects and the even fewer women of color are further marginalized.

Masha: The high ratio of men to women is often brought up throughout the book, and it seriously affects how women and especially women of color are treated in this environment. There’s also a lot of Canadian regionalism I wasn’t super familiar with as an American? So many people from so many provinces all came to the oil sands for the slightest chance of getting their children a better life.

Elvie: Reading the book as an American I personally think my distance to and unfamiliarity with a lot of the regionalist aspects that tie into Canada’s class and social structure really supports the book’s themes around alienation. Even Katie herself questioned at times why provincial differences matter, but she too also occasionally wallowed in her own pride about being from Cape Breton, while also putting herself up to self-scrutiny in acknowledging that she subdued her natural accent when she went to university. Everyone in some way is seeking a sense of belonging, and there are a lot of questions over whether or not it is worth seeking that sense of belonging for a place that is rejecting you. Katie is trying to attach herself to a world that is antagonistic to women, meanwhile she is dealing with these push-and-pull thoughts over whether or not this is a world she is willing to forgive because she still saw some good within it

There is a lot of nuance articulated within all the depictions of Katie’s own naive attempts to immediately try to find refuge with other women, only to find that they were either just as misanthropic as everyone else, or that she realizes she has such as limited scope of what she sees as struggle due to her whiteness compared to women of color. There are people struggling just as she is and are simply following directions to put food on the table. But then there is also a lot of initial blame she puts on herself over her complicity: through both the internal guilt over the trauma she endures from these years and the external guilt for working in an industry that is potentially causing harm to the communities around it.

An illustrated three panel comic sequence that features a series of scenes of large vehicles driving on an open road against a background of active smokestacks and a dark night sky.

How did you feel about Katie’s journey and realization of the ways Alberta’s oil sands worked to diminish wildlife and displace Native Canadians?

Emily: It seemed to me that most of this realization happened in retrospect, and that felt very realistic. It put her experiences into a context that she hadn’t been aware of at the time.

Elvie: Absolutely—I agree with Emily. I think it ties into a lot with my aforementioned response over how Katie had to grapple firsthand issues tied in class and gender in ways she didn’t expect, just as much as we the reader are learning about all of this with her. They were not present at all in the beginning of the book, so I appreciate how Ducks closed in on Indigenous perspectives and credited those voices in the end.

Masha: Yeah, because as stated in Ducks, the reason she came to the oil sands in the first place was to pay off her student loans, but she didn’t have to consider why that was the place to make a lot of money quickly until much later, and the reader goes through this learning process the same way Katie does. Like Elvie and Emily already said, I appreciate how Ducks did bring attention to the environmental impact of the oil sands and how they affected Indigenous communities towards the end.

A lot of us are familiar with Kate Beaton’s work already! How does that influence reading Ducks?

Emily: I feel like I know Kate Beaton’s family already, from years of following her charming journal comics on Twitter and Patreon. The early scenes with her parents felt so homey because of that. Her parents’ personalities are lovable and predictable. I think that upped the stakes for how disorienting the camps would feel.

Masha: I read an early draft from Ducks I remember seeing posted somewhere many years ago, which was just rough sketches of a scene that ended up in this memoir near the end. I was impressed by just how much more there was to the camps than that initial sequence showed, as well as how much of that sketch comic did make it to the final version. I was also surprised she started Hark! A Vagrant in an environment like that.

Emily: Yeah, what a contrast! When I was reading ark, Hark! A Vagrant years ago, I’m sure I imagined them being composed on a pleasant green hillside with a babbling brook and flower petals.

Elvie: I too have been familiarized and so accustomed to Beaton’s more lighthearted and whimsical style seen in Hark! A Vagrant and The Princess and the Pony, so coming into Ducks was such a huge departure from what I was used to and expecting. I think the developments that Beaton has been willing to share openly in her family life in recent years was honestly a starter to what eventually ends up unraveling within the more grounded and upsetting themes Ducks was willing to boldly tackle. I agree that the juxtaposition between these works, and her signature artstyle that is usually assigned to depicting scenes that are comical or charming, sets up the disorientating and discomforting feelings that Beaton wanted to intentionally convey just as she experienced.

An illustrated five panel comic sequence of a young woman walking along a shoreline. In the second to last panel, she looks up to the sky and holds her arm over her eyes. The final panel depicts a seagull flying along the sun.

What are your overall takeaways?

Emily: We are three-quarters of the way through the book before ducks are mentioned! When they are, it’s the famous news story about how hundreds of them got stuck in a toxic waste water pond. When they become a news item, it is clear that the way they got stuck in the oil there is analogous to how the humans are also stuck at a location they wouldn’t have chosen, by the presence of oil there. Beaton says, talking about how changed and implicated she feels after her time on the sands, “Now I can’t extract myself from having come” (365). By the end, it’s clear that time there changes you. It changes how you expect to be treated and what behavior you accept.

Masha: You do see the ducks throughout the book, though! Or, I think they’re ducks, maybe they’re geese or something. But there’s a recurring motif of birds flying across a full moon that makes the situation with the ducks hit harder when it arrives, because of how it changes that visual motif.

Emily: That’s a great point! They’re there visually, even if they’re not part of the written narrative yet. It is a consistent motif.

Elvie: I think Ducks really was a natural direction for Beaton to go at this point in her career. As I mentioned, I think the willingness to talk about the tragedy she has had to face in her own life in this recent present was setting a path for all of us to accompany her to go even further back into other hardships that were part of her past. I don’t think it’s reductive to say that this is essentially a coming-of-age story, because, as Emily has perfectly reiterated with how the titular ducks have found themselves stuck in a situation they did not foresee, this was an expected turning point for a young woman’s life that has potentially helped nurture her into this public figure we now know as Kate Beaton. It is very clear that Ducks is part of a much bigger healing journey and I am thankful Beaton is willing to share it in hopes that it will hopefully resonate with others who may find themselves in it, especially around several topics that are not well-researched and discussed even within her own local community.

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Elvie Mae Parian

Elvie Mae Parian

Elvie somehow finds bliss in purposefully complicating the art of storytelling and undertaking the painful practice of animation. If you see her on Twitter at @lvmaeparian, she is doing neither of those things.

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