Thirteen writers and artists boarded NYC’s subway system with laptops and notebooks for the two-day MTA Zine Residency. On the first day, the zinesters traveled along the F train from Queens through Manhattan to the end of the line in Coney Island, in Brooklyn. Day two took place on the Staten Island ferry. The Barnard Zine Library launched the program as a response to the hoopla surrounding Amtrak’s botched writer residency program. The New York Times reports:
It was also conceived partly as a tongue-in-cheek response to a residency announced last March by Amtrak. That program gave free round-trip tickets to selected writers who would compose their work while on long-distance train trips. It was met with widespread enthusiasm that diminished after it emerged that the forms provided by Amtrak to aspiring participants gave the company the right to sell, publish or otherwise use writings submitted with an application.
