Literary Hub premieres the striking cover design of Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Fall 2022). This graphic memoir contains within it the untold story of displacement, inhumanity, and isolation which occurs when Canada’s East Coast labourers head west to Alberta in search of economic opportunity. Ducks is available for pre-order online or via your local bookstore now.
Here’s what Beaton had to say to Literary Hub about the cover reveal and the book’s imminent release,
I had this book in mind for many years before I brought it to Drawn & Quarterly, and it took me that many more to create it… It has lived in my mind for a long time. Of course, it is my own memories, so it has lived with me since they have existed, but my time in Fort McMurray had such an impact on me that I think I have been subconsciously sorting those memories into panels before I even knew I was doing it as a way of catharsis or release—it is the comic artists’ natural exercise.
In short, this was a book I had to make—was always going to make. But now on the eve of a wider audience reading the thing that I have held on so tightly to for so many years, I find myself nervously pacing the rooms I’ve emptied out from my memory into the book. I wanted to bear witness to what has stayed with me so indelibly, I wanted to get to the heart of it, I hope I have. It is a funny place, with the book off to the printers now after so long, to be here in the empty room, waiting to find out.
Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House) calls Ducks “an exceptionally beautiful book about loneliness, labor, and survival.” Patricia Lockwood (No One Is Talking About This) finds it to be “a masterpiece, a heartbreak, a nightlight shining in the dark.”
“Ducks delivers an immersive, harrowing journey through an industry where the lure of fast money belies darker realities of casual brutality, profound loneliness and soul-cracking isolation,” says Jessica Bruder, author of Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century.