Kate Beaton wrote her graphic memoir Ducks at a ‘hedgehog corner desk’ in her dining room | CBC Arts

Leading up to Canada Reads, CBC Arts is bringing you daily essays about where this year’s authors write for our series Where I Write. This edition features Ducks author Kate Beaton.

The corner of the dining room is messy and piled high with papers and junk. It is, unfortunately, like all of my office spaces before it.

The difference with this one is that it is in the middle of my busy house. I’ve been using it for the past four years. I’ve had many offices and studio spaces, but since we bought this old farmhouse to raise our family in, the corner of the dining room is where my desk has been.

I am sure my husband wishes the corner wasn’t an eyesore (sorry Morgan), but I guess I am like a little hedgehog that way: I burrow in, and where everything is makes sense to me, at least. The children don’t mind — they are one and three. They are busy making the entire house a messy burrow.

The problem with the dining room desk is that it is hard to get any work done with the busy home that orbits around it at all hours. It is definitely hard to work with small children climbing up your legs and taking your pens. If they are not there, I also have a really good and guilty view of all the chores that are not getting done. But when you have time to yourself to work, you can’t look at that. You can’t think about that.

Before I had children, a friend told me, “You will be amazed how much work you will get done in a few hours now.” And that turned out to be true — that is when I do my work now, within the few blessed hours a day or week that I get to do it. I think this is something working parents know: the power of those few hours. Because at that point, I load myself up on far too much coffee, and I get to it, in my hedgehog corner desk. 

I was drawing Ducks the whole time in this house. Drawing takes infinitely longer than writing; it’s like writing a second book. You take what you have written and give it life. In fact, I drew Ducks through two pregnancies, two babies, much of that in this dining room corner.

This is the first work I really did as a mother, and somehow that is fitting, because this book is the change in my life I was ready for. I owe a lot to Morgan for taking time when the kids were born to be with them as well — time, that precious commodity.

This was a demanding book to make. It was personal and emotional. And if I had a deadline, I blew through it many times. It’s not easy, in the dining room corner. But I’m home. I worked hard to make it back here. And I welcome the changes in my life, even if my workspace will always be a hedgehog burrow.

Read this year’s Where I Write essays every day this week on CBC Arts and tune in to Canada Reads from March 27–30.