RELEASE DATE: FEB 2023!
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR GOING REMOTE
“Going Remote is the perfect book for an imperfect moment. Bessie and Glanting deftly weave personal stakes and larger concepts together, illustrating how the reaction to the pandemic impacts an individual life, a profession, and a community. It’s a love letter to teaching, a grappling with life-threatening illness, and a rumination on the nature of connection and isolation in the computer age, all brought together cohesively by Bessie’s thoughtful narrative and Glanting’s complex, textured art. This is comics at the highest level: beautiful, profound, and full of heart.” — Justin Hall, Chair MFA in Comics at California College of the Arts, and editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (Fantagraphics)
“Going Remote: A Teacher’s Journey is an incisive, multifaceted, and profound meditation on survival–in teaching, in learning, in illness, in family, in injustice, and in a present hurtling towards a future on which no one can depend. Sensitively and intensely illustrated, this wonderful book challenges readers concretely to visualize and think through possible futures–personal, social, technological, and educational–a foothold for anyone trying to understand not only teaching and the pandemic, but our place in the world as caring human beings.” — Jay Gillen, Author Educating for Insurgency: The Roles of Young People in Schools of Poverty (AK Press), and The Power in The Room: Radical Education Through Youth Organizing and Employment (Beacon)
ABOUT GOING REMOTE
A searingly honest graphic memoir dispatch from a community college professor who cares deeply for his students and family while also combating personal health issues from the frontlines of public education during the pandemic. Published by SEVEN STORIES and CENSORED PRESS
Read a free chapter of the comic here (click HERE):
With Peter Glanting’s powerful illustrations, author Adam Bessie, an English professor and graphic essayist, uses the unique historical moment of the COVID-19 pandemic as a catalyst to explore the existing inequalities and student struggles that plague the public education system. This graphic memoir chronicles the reverberations from the onset of the pandemic in 2020 when students and educators left their physical classrooms for remote learning. As a professor at a community college, Bessie shows how despite these challenges, teachers work tirelessly to create a more equitable educational system by responding to mental health issues and student needs.
From the Black Lives Matter protests to fielding distressed emails from students to considering the future of his own career, Going Remote also tells the personal story of Bessie’s cancer diagnosis and treatment during the pandemic. A fusion of memoir, meditation, and scholarship, Going Remote is a powerful account of a crisis moment in educational history demonstrating both personal and societal changes.
Adam Bessie 