I first became aware of Kate Beaton through her charming picture book, The Princess and the Pony, released in 2015. My, at the time, young daughters loved the book about a tiny, warrior princess who wants a noble steed like the older warriors. Instead on her birthday she is gifted a pony that farts too much.
Shortly after the publication of her graphic novel autobiography, Ducks, in 2022, it seemed everyone on the internet was declaring what a good book it was. However, I wasn’t really interested in an autobiography about mining oil sands. Fast forward to this year and I was in charge of my book club’s next pick. I suggested Ducks and everyone agreed. The week before our club met, I still hadn’t read it. Luckily my local library had a copy on the shelves, and I was off to the races to complete it in time.
Kate (Katie) grew up in the far Eastern Nova Scotia islands of Canada. She loved the natural beauty, but the sad reality was that the traditional jobs of fishing and mining were no longer around and there was a steady progression of young people moving away to find jobs. Katie had gone to school for an art degree and worked in museums during college. Unfortunately, the jobs available to her were low paying and she didn’t want to be in college debt forever. So, she did what many people had been doing for years and went to Alberta to work in the oil sands.
She had heard that working in the tool crib (where people checked out tools) would be an okay position for a young woman with no skills in the field. Even so she wasn’t mentally prepared for the hardship of the ratio of men to women being 50 to 1. Katie shares her experience dealing with the bitter cold, sexual harassment and rape, along with the emotional conflict of the damage being done to the environment from extracting oil. Throughout her time working the oil sands she contemplated how being there affected people from using drugs to affairs and wondered if they would behave this way at home or it was due to the extreme working conditions.
It was during this challenging time that Katie went from creating silly comics and posting them in the office to starting a webcomic called Hark!, a Vagrant that became highly popular and since has been published in graphic novels. After her time in Alberta Katie was able to focus on the comic that she wrote from 2007 to 2018, along with two children’s picture books. She has since returned to Nova Scotia where she lives with her husband and two children.
