- Karen Karbo/Globe Pequod Press
- Maybe Karen Karbo’s next book in this series will be written on a train!
If you know any writers who use Twitter, you’ve probably heard a lot about the Amtrak Writers’ Residency by now—it’s a program, inspired by a tweet, that puts writers on trains to work on creative projects while soaking up the romance of Amtrak.
Wait, I’m being serious! Trains ARE romantic. Even the ones that take four hours to get from Portland to Seattle. I mean really why can’t we have nice things like Europe BUT I DIGRESS. Yesterday, Amtrak announced the first 24 residency winners, and among them is Portland essayist and Julia Child expert Karen Karbo!
Karbo joins a pretty impressive list of writers and journalists, including Farai Chideya, Jennifer Finney Boylan, and Saul Williams, plus, um, one self-declared “famous pickup artist” (AMTRAK NO), who will all get a free round-trip ride on a long-distance line.
But not everyone is happy about it. Early critics of the residency pointed out that the application fine print basically amounted to Amtrak taking far-reaching ownership of writers’ application materials for corporate purposes, apparently for all applicants, whether or not they won a residency. At best, this is pretty atypical for writing contests; at worst, it might be potentially exploitative. We’ll just have to wait and see how that nerd scandal plays out.