ducks two years in the oil sands kate beaton

If you’ve ever been to the Halifax airport at certain times you’ll see the parents waiting for their kids to come in. Every rural place in Canada and everywhere else is in decline and exports people, but I don’t know of other places that craft entire cultures around the leaving and the longing the way we do. Our main export is labour, and if you export labour for generations you start to believe what people say about you, which is that whatever you can get somewhere else is better than the thing you have at home. There have been generations of people leaving for work wherever it’s been available – in Boston, Ontario, out West.

We have experienced diasporic longing for so long that it’s part of our culture. I think it causes a rift in their sense of self. Having experienced it firsthand, what do you think it does to a person? To a culture? You became part of this huge, legendary Maritime diaspora – Cape Bretoners, Newfoundlanders forced to go to choose, as you put it, between home and opportunity. And it’s been so long now that it’s difficult to put myself exactly back in those shoes. When you hit that point there’s a lot of things that are off-kilter. I would go to a bar and people would be drinking and laughing and having a normal time and I’d just be there with my drink, like, I don’t know how to talk to people. When I left the camp environment I found it very difficult to be a part of the real world again. There’s a lot that you’d de-program afterwards. How did you recreate all the detailed, dialogue-rich scenes? I was also working on a television show, Pinecone & Pony, which came out on Apple this year, so there were different things going on. It took six years to get the book totally finished, but there were a lot of times when I wasn’t working on it at all. My sister was diagnosed with cancer and went through different treatments and eventually passed away, and I also had two children. There was a lot of stopping and starting.

I don’t think anybody in this industry should sit on their laurels for too long. There were a lot of challenges, but it was time for me to do it and leave Hark! A Vagrant behind. It’s very difficult to take your personal story and make cuts when you’re so in the thick of it, to do what’s best for a book as opposed to the thing that you maybe care about the most. I wanted to be with people who know books. I came to Drawn & Quarterly because I believe in the partnership between editors and writers. This memoir is very different from what you’ve done before in tone, length, genre.

Ducks two years in the oil sands kate beaton