Eleanor Stevens grew up in Santa Fe and moved back to town in 2017 to study dual language education at UNM. At the same time she was learning to teach, friends and neighbors encouraged her to pursue her passion for drawing. Since 2018, Eleanor has been developing a style of “comic journaling,” combining figures with dialogue to record her experiences and comment on the world around her. Eleanor was teaching second grade with the Santa Fe Public Schools when the pandemic hit. Her students’ families are the people who staff restaurants, clean houses and hotels, and build new buildings in Santa Fe. Many of them lost their incomes in March, and some had to seek aid for the first time. Since the onset of the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis, the amount of food provided monthly by the Food Depot has increased by 80 percent. Even though Eleanor’s students’ families were facing stress and uncertainty, they spent countless hours learning how to connect their children to online classes and countless hours more helping them with their schoolwork. COVID taught Eleanor that these dedicated families are the children’s first and most important teachers. Eleanor tries to keep her work simple and vulnerable. She draws in pen so she won’t be tempted to erase. If she wants to change an image, she cuts out the mistake or pastes new paper over it. Sometimes she draws on paper scraps: old notes from her grandma, pages from her teaching notebook, to-do-lists. To add color, she uses the colored pencils she’s had since middle school.