Going Remote: A Teacher’s Story

Professor and graphic essayist Bessie intercuts an account of his decade-long brain tumor with COVID’s effects on his community college students. He’s returned to campus after a writing sabbatical, eager to teach. But the epidemic hits, and classes switch to Zoom. To his horror, his most vulnerable students, who often lack tech access, disappear from this strange virtual world, where individuals become bounded by small squares of screen. And then his cancer seems to be regrowing. The double trauma pushes him further towards comparisons with SF dystopias as the newly shocking fragility of existence—and evaporating collaborations for the greater good—make social safety nets increasingly elusive. Illustrator/designer Glanting renders these seismic shifts in smudgy gray and black line art, people’s faces simplified as if to suggest how these circumstances destroy human nature and reduce human complexity. Some of his backgrounds and imaginary machines, however, appear in near threatening detail as the book contemplates how to adapt “the machine” to human good without destroying humanity in the process.