Kate Beaton and Alexander MacLeod start a conversation in Three NFB Takes on Class, with the screening of short films It’s Just Better (1982), Folk Art Found Me (1993), and Scoggie (1975).

Kate Beaton is a comics artist and award-winning graphic novelist hailing from Mabou, who may be best known for her award-winning and critically acclaimed memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (2022). Her comic strip Hark! A Vagrant was collected into a volume in 2011, and she is the author of the children's books The Princess and the Pony (2015) and King Baby (2016). Her most recent book is Bodies of Art, Bodies of Labour (2025).

Alexander MacLeod is a fiction writer and a professor of English and Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary’s University with roots in Dunvegan. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta and in the O. Henry Prize Stories 2019. His first collection, Light Lifting (2010), was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and Lagomorph, his collaboration with Andrew Steeves, won the 2021 Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia’s Masterworks Arts Award. Animal Person (2022), a new collection of stories was named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail, and CBC Books.