Writing Powered by Amtrak

In his iconic essay about travelling on a cruise ship, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” David Foster Wallace quotes from an earlier piece of cruise-ship literature by the memoirist Frank Conroy: “Bright sun, warm still air, the brilliant blue-green of the Caribbean under the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky.” Nice writing, but Wallace had a problem with it: it turned out that Conroy had gone on his cruise for free and had been paid by Celebrity Cruises to write his piece. (In Conroy’s words, to Wallace: “I prostituted myself.”) There was “real badness” in this affair, Wallace writes, in part because it involved a commercial enterprise persuading one of the most admired writers in the nation to tout its product, “and to do it with a professional eloquence and authority that few lay perceivers and articulators could hope to equal.” (This is punctuated with a great, Wallacean footnote: “E.g. after reading Conroy’s essay on board, whenever I’d look up at the sky it wouldn’t be the sky I was seeing, it was the vast lapis lazuli dome of the sky.”)

Gross’s situation was different from Conroy’s in a couple of ways. Amtrak is largely government-funded, though it operates as a for-profit enterprise. Also, it would cover Gross’s travel but wouldn’t pay her for writing. Still, there were similarities. While Amtrak was processing the tickets, Gross got an e-mail from Emily Mannix, a public-relations representative who works with Amtrak. “We’d love for you to share any content that [you] find along the way with your social networks, and then have you do a Q&A for the Amtrak blog,” Quinn wrote. “How does that sound?” Gross replied, a couple of minutes later, “Sure!” When she thought about it a little more, though, she felt weird about the request. She called Mannix and explained that she wanted to make sure this wasn’t a deal where she had to write about Amtrak in exchange for the free seat. No, Mannix said, it was nothing like that. If she felt an “organic” desire to talk about the trip, she should go ahead, but there was no requirement. Gross felt alright with that—and with the Q. & A. request—and accepted.

Less than two weeks later, she boarded a sleeper cabin on the Lake Shore Limited, complete with a tabletop that doubled as a chessboard and a seat that doubled as a toilet. She slept, met some people, talked to her father on the phone. She also tweeted (“My preoccupation with whether the two people dining next to me are a May-December couple or father/daughter is troubling”) and shared some photos (her cabin, some spindly trees, a snowy street corner in Buffalo). And she wrote a blog post, which The Paris Review has now published. Its subject is train travel—in particular, how nice it is:

      I’ve always been a claustrophile, and I think that explains some of the appeal—the train is bounded, compartmentalized, and cozily small, like a carrel in a college library. Everything has its place. The towel goes on the ledge beneath the mirror; the sink goes into its hole in the wall; during the day, the bed, which slides down from overhead, slides up into a high pocket of space. There is comfort in the certainty of these arrangements. The journey is bounded, too: I know when it will end. Train time is found time. My main job is to be transported; any reading or writing is extracurricular. The looming pressure of expectation dissolves. And the movement of a train conjures the ultimate sense of protection—being a baby, rocked in a bassinet.

I called Gross on Sunday evening to talk about her trip. I confessed that when I read those well-wrought sentences, I recalled Wallace’s concerns about Conroy’s cruise piece. How did she feel about using her evident talent, and her precious writing hours, for a piece that promoted Amtrak’s commercial goals? (She also let Amtrak use one of the photos she had taken on her trip, to accompany the Q. & A. with her that it published in January.) Gross reminded me that she had been interested in train travel since childhood and said she might have written about it even if she hadn’t gone on the Amtrak-sponsored trip. “Everything I wrote felt very genuine,” she said. She pointed out that she had disclosed to readers the nature of the trip and that her piece hadn’t been wholly glowing. The trip lasted “thirty-nine hours in transit—forty-four, with delays,” she wrote.

On the latter point, Amtrak didn’t seem to mind. Gross sent the piece to her contacts there after its publication, and Amtrak shared it on Twitter, noting that this “all started with a simple tweet to us.” Others—writers, journalists, train-travelling laymen—chimed in about how much fun this had all been. Two days later, Quinn revealed that Amtrak would continue the residency program.

I spoke with Quinn on Monday, and she told me, “This is the most organic form of advertising for us—different people on our trains and exposing their audience to what long-distance train travel is like.” She said Amtrak hopes to make “a more formalized announcement” about the residency program later this week but has some early ideas about how it will work. It hopes to offer at least two residencies per month, to people selected by a group including Amtrak employees and representatives from the “community of writers.” (She also noted, “We are a for-profit organization, so we are definitely determining when the best time is to send these people. I’m not going to send all of the residents in May, June, and July during our peak system, when we could be selling those tickets.”) Quinn told me that she expects the program to seek a diverse range of residents and to consider the size of an applicant’s social-media following: “We want this to be mutually beneficial, so we would like some people with some built-in audience,” she said. While she doesn’t expect Amtrak to require residents to write positively about their trip—or mention it at all—she added, “Obviously my hope would be that as we work with some of these people, they’re so moved by the experience, that they’re compelled to tell their audiences about Amtrak long-distance train travel.”

I told Quinn about Wallace’s essay and asked whether some of his criticisms might apply to this situation. “You raise very valuable points,” she said. “Is this is a disingenuous program? I would say no, in that this wasn’t something that was thought up in our last marketing brainstorm, like, How can we bring buzz for Amtrak? This was something that was thought up by the writing community, and we happened to be in the position to offer them a vehicle. It’s their writing powered by Amtrak.”

The life of a writer can be difficult and unstable. Paychecks for freelance gigs arrive infrequently, if at all. Book advances are rarely large enough to let an author quit a day job. Nonprofit organizations, educational institutions, and government branches like the National Endowment for the Arts try to give authors some resources while they write—grants, fellowships, residencies. Amtrak is one of a couple of commercial entities that have been experimenting with residency programs of their own: recently, the Standard Hotel in the East Village joined with The Paris Review to offer a free three-week stay (estimated value: ten thousand dollars) to the author Lysley Tenorio, who was named a writer-in-residence. Some people have argued persuasively that this sort of thing is a positive development. Isn’t this a better use of corporate funds than many others? Doesn’t it bring a much-needed source of new funding to the art world? Plus, they point out, aren’t there potential conflicts of interest with any funder—including the government, a university, or a nonprofit? As long as writers aren’t obliged to promote the enterprise in return, what’s the problem?

Chee, the writer who proposed the Amtrak residency in the first place, is a friend of mine. He wrote much of his first novel on the F train in New York, on his way to and from work at a midtown steakhouse. (Additional full disclosure: I’m also friendly with Tenorio and have attended traditional artists’ residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo, to which I’ve made small—double-digit—donations.) While Amtrak was planning Gross’s trip, it was also working on one for Chee, in May—a three-day voyage from New York to Portland, Oregon. When I asked Chee whether he felt a commercially sponsored residency could be problematic, he replied, in an e-mail, “Well, it could be—if there were conditions. But there weren’t.” Referring to Quinn, he said, “She didn’t ask me for one thing other than possibly to conduct an interview at the end.” (He showed me his exchange with her, which confirmed the lack of quid pro quos. In one e-mail, he wrote, “I also wanted to add that if there’s a social media aspect to this that you’d like me to consider, I’m happy to cooperate.” He added, “I’d be happy to blog the trip, as well as perhaps write about it for some of the places I write for.” Quinn replied: “We’d love to have you cover your trip via social, but also want you to feel free to unplug and write about your experience post trip. After you have traveled we’d also love to do a quick interview with you for the Amtrak blog.”)

Chee seemed enthusiastic about the momentum that has gathered around his idea. He is teaching in Austin this semester, and after classes end he will fly to New York, where he lives, and board a series of trains to reach Portland. He doesn’t have plans to write about the experience in any concrete form, though he expects he will mention it on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, “in the diaristic mode I usually do when I travel anywhere.” It will be summertime; the bare-branched trees and slushy streets from Gross’s photos will have been replaced by rolling grass and dun-colored hills. But the train cabin itself might feel familiar—the ideal space for a writer, like a carrel in a college library.