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TRANSCRIPT Bullseye with Jesse Thorn: Graphic Novelist Kate Beaton on “Ducks”

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.

CW: Mentions of sexual assault

Guests: Kate Beaton

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Bullseye is a celebration of the best of arts and culture in public radio form. Host Jesse Thorn sifts the wheat from the chaff to bring you in-depth interviews with the most revered and revolutionary minds in our culture.

Bullseye has been featured in Time, The New York Times, GQ and McSweeney’s, which called it “the kind of show people listen to in a more perfect world.” Since April 2013, the show has been distributed by NPR.

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