Graphic Novelist Kate Beaton

Bullseye with Jesse Thorn

NPR

Society & Culture

4.7 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

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Summary

Kate Beaton is a Canadian comics artist. She's the author of the award-winning comics series Hark! A Vagrant and Step Aside, Pops, which each earned spots on the New York Times bestseller list. Her most recent work, a graphic memoir called Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, takes readers in a different direction. Ducks follows Kate's life just after college. She'd graduated with student debt and got a chance to pay it off early: all she had to do was work for a little while mining oil in Eastern Alberta. The oil sands are a world unlike any other, towns and cities created from scratch to forcibly extract resources from the earth. People worked there because they desperately needed a job, for myriad reasons. Kate worked alongside people, mostly men, who were separated from their families, their hometowns and the normal expectations of human behavior. Kate talks to Bullseye about her journey writing this memoir. Content warning: This conversation with Kate Beaton contains some mentions of sexual harassment and sexual violence.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of MaximumFun.org and is distributed by NPR.
0:20.3	It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. Kate Beaton is a comics artist. She was last on our show.
0:27.5	I mean something like 15 years ago. At the time she had this great web comic called Hark of Vagrant.
0:34.6	I could tell you what it was about if it was about something in particular, but it wasn't exactly.
0:41.2	There were a lot of historical figures like Napoleon or George Washington and there were jokes about
0:48.9	19th century literature and there was a lot of Kate in it personally. In fact, I would say if there
0:56.3	was a unifying theme to Hark of Vagrant, it was her voice, light and expressive and very, very funny.
1:05.4	Last year she published something very different, a graphic memoir called Ducks. Ducks follows Kate's
1:12.4	life just after college. She graduated with student debt and got a chance to pay it off early.
1:18.3	All she had to do was work for a little while in eastern Alberta, mining oil. The oil sands are
1:25.6	a world unlike any other. Towns and cities created from scratch to suck resources from the earth.
1:33.1	People worked there because they needed a job, bad for all kinds of reasons.
1:38.8	Kate's co-workers, mostly men, were separated from their families, their hometowns, and the normal
1:45.7	rules of human behavior. In this dangerous and desperate world she witnessed sexual harassment
1:52.0	and sexual violence and experienced them firsthand. And I will mention here that we are going to
1:58.0	talk about that topic some in our conversation. Ducks is indeed about violence against both people
2:05.4	and land, but it's also about real human beings in a lonely, liminal place. Just trying to find
2:13.6	a way through the world. I think it's a really special block. Let's get into it.
2:23.6	Kate Beaton, I was about to say welcome back to Bullseye, but actually we have looked deep in our
2:29.1	memory and we think that the last time we spoke was when the show was called The Sound of Young
2:34.4	America. So welcome to Bullseye. It's nice to talk to you again. Thank you. I'm happy to be on this
2:39.6	new show, brand new show of yours. Same program I've been doing every week since I was 19.
	...

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