MABOU: Inverness County artist Kate Beaton was named the winner of Canada Reads 2023.
The 39-year-old Beaton’s graphic memoir Ducks took the CBC’s annual national literary competition on March 30.
“I don’t think people knew that I was going to be called up live on the air so all my relatives were sending messages,” she said with a laugh. “I got my chance to say my piece as well. They gave me a few minutes to talk, which was nice.”
While she was happy to receive the prestigious prize, Beaton said it was a “unique experience” to have her work ranked in that manner.
“They were all great books,” she told The Reporter. “It’s kind of an awkward thing to sit through, to be honest with you. You would never go up and compare to a bunch of other extremely good books for no reason, and downplay any of them for the sake of your own. To have to sit through that or listen to people’s critiques of yours too is in some ways kind of excruciating as the author because the other books were all wonderful and I think that even the other judges thought so but the nature of the program is to try and defend and eliminate until the last.”
Ducks was supported by Jeopardy champion Mattea Roach who argued that the work, which recounts Beaton’s time spent working in the Alberta oil sands, was the “one book to shift your perspective.” Throughout the debates, CBC said Roach promoted the advantages of the graphic memoir medium, and put an effective case forward for why Beaton’s book should be the one every Canadian reads right now.
“Mattea Roach was just unbelievable. They did such a fantastic job in service of my book and the work that was put in there. I could never ask for a better defender,” noted Beaton. “I’m very grateful to have won and to have had this amazing defender at your side and behind you.”
Beaton was born and raised in Inverness County, and graduated from Mount Allison University with a double degree in History and Anthropology. During the years she spent out West, Beaton began creating webcomics under the name Hark! A Vagrant, quickly drawing a following around the world. The webcomic, which touched on historical and literary topics with comedic flair, gained a following of 500,000 monthly visitors.
The collections of her landmark strip Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops each spent several months on the New York Times graphic novel bestseller list, as well as appearing on best of the year lists from Time, The Washington Post, Vulture, NPR Books, and winning the Eisner, Ignatz, Harvey, and Doug Wright Awards. She has also published the picture books King Baby and The Princess and the Pony.
Beaton lives in Mabou with her family, and her husband author Morgan Murray, who was himself shortlisted for CBC Reads.
Beaton describes herself as a cartoonist and Ducks as a comic book. She said the introduction of graphic novels, like Persepolis, over the past few decades provided the medium with more attention.
“Comic books have gone a long way in the past couple of decades, in terms of what they have been recognized as being able to do,” she said. “Only one comic has ever won a Pulitzer and that was Art Spiegelman’s Maus and that really turned up what people paid attention to.”
The CBC said Ducks is the first comic style book ever to win Canada Reads.
Beaton describes Ducks as a memoir of her time working in the oil and gas industry in Alberta between 2005 and 2008 to pay off her student loans.
“Which is a scenario very familiar to people around here because if we haven’t gone and worked there ourselves, we had people in our families who did, or are doing it now,” she said. “I just did what everyone else was doing. I had no money and everybody was going. At that time, the streets were just emptying out.”
The artist said this was a time after the closures of the Atlantic groundfishery, the Sydney steel plant, and the coal mines, as well as a precarious time for the pulp and paper mill in Point Tupper.
“It seemed like there was just a decimation of industry on the east coast, especially around Cape Breton and Newfoundland,” she recalled. “The choice was just go, there was no choice, it was just leave.”
Beaton told CBC she knew she wasn’t travelling for a good time, and knew she wasn’t going to like it, but she also felt grateful to have a good paying job, referring to the situation as “money jail.”
Without much information upon leaving home, Beaton was entering the unknown.
“I had no real expectation about what a camp was like, or what the job sites would actually be like, or what the atmosphere would be like, or anything like that,” she noted. “Even that we were on these Indigenous lands, anything at all. The image that you had was that it was out in the wilderness around nothing and then you get there and it’s a real wake up call to be dropped into this environment where everyone is sort of being re-socialized in camp environment, which is completely different.”
Ducks recounts Beaton’s experiences with economic migration, loneliness, sexism, and environmental destruction using an illustrated narrative.
“A lot of the narrative is heavily coloured because of the fact that I was a young woman there alone and the workforce was so heavily male,” she said. “I experienced a lot, a lot of sexism, a lot of harassment. If you had a memoir from a young man, you would barely see that probably because it wouldn’t be part of his everyday life, but it was an enormous part of mine so it’s a big part of the book.”
The harassment was so “relentless” for Beaton that it became a part of her life.
“You get used to it, you get on with it, and you can’t do anything about it so it becomes how you exist with this happening around you, and how you keep on with it despite the fact that there are obvious signs of danger around it, and acceleration into physical danger,” she remarked.
Another issue in the work camps is mental health, noted Beaton.
“They’re so isolated, and they’re so far away from your home and community,” she said. “You have a lot of people going into addiction problems and become people that they weren’t at home. When you’re lonely, and you’re far away, and you’re working so long, and you’re separated from the rest of society, and you’re in this toxic environment that’s so heavily reliant on your labour, and you might not have a good boss, and you might not have good relationships with other people, things can sour. Your life can go upside down and you might struggle, and there might be no help. You see a lot of people in pain and in crisis but there was nothing there for them.”
Beaton said some people remained unaffected by those conditions, while others disintegrated into violence and aggression.
“We all know people who went out there and then they became different in a negative way,” she said.
Beaton was also witness to environmental destruction, particularly aimed at First Nations, an experience that affects her to this day, and one that informed the title of the graphic novel.
And while there were other societal problems in the camps, like racism, Beaton said she was the recipient of kindness as well.
“There was lots of racism as well which I couldn’t get too much into because that wasn’t my experience but it was there,” she recalled. “There were a lot of people who were looking out for me because they knew I was by myself and was from Cape Breton, especially people from Inverness County.”
Ducks was named a top Canadian comic by CBC Books in 2022 and was also one of two Canadian books on Barack Obama’s list of favourite books of 2022.
Since winning the prize, Beaton said she has received many calls from friends and family.
“It’s nice to see how proud people are,” added Beaton. “I’ve always had a lot of support since coming out with this book from people in my life, from way back. It’s been very touching.”