About
Religion: A feminist bicycle zine
$2,132
82
Broadcasting on paper since 2010, Taking the Lane is the This American Life of feminist bike zines.
Every three months, we choose a topic and explore it in-depth, usually through the voices of multiple contributors. The topic for the twelfth issue of Taking the Lane, due out this November, is the intersection of religion and bicycling.
What do religion and bicycling have in common? It turns out, it's more than just one thing. For some of our contributors to this issue, bicycling has opened their eyes and minds to religion in a new way. For others, it's an escape and alternative. For all of them, a bicycle has proven to be a path to tolerance, acceptance, and openness, whether of an idea, a community, or themselves.
- One contributor writes about her decision to drop out of seminary school to work at a bike shop.
- An encounter with a group of Orthodox cyclists leads a secular Jewish woman to discover new empathy for practices and gender roles she had never understood.
- A contributor tells the story of how his passion for bicycling caused a crisis of faith...and gave him the means to resolve it.
- For a young woman growing up in Nebraska in the 1980s, her bicycle is her salvation from a religion that condemns her sexuality.
...and there are more... but you'll have to back the project to find out.
This issue of Taking the Lane is guest edited by our intern Kirsten Collins. She's a senior at Reed College where she studies religion and entertains schemes of becoming a publishing mogul. Elly Blue is the publisher, overseeing the production and design. Our fonts were created by Ian Lynam. Contributors are Rebecca Rindler, Carole Snow, Nathan Nykamp, Halley Weaver, Beth Hamon, Maria M. Benet, Stephen Miller, Tracy Halasinski, and Jessie Calkins.
Pledge Pedal
With this project, we're releasing our first ever Taking The Lane Audiozine. The audiozine features ten of our favorite essays and stories from issues five through ten of Taking the Lane, (mostly) read by the authors. The collection clocks in at about 80 minutes, and is available as a digital download, on cassette tape, and on compact disk.
Among other contributions: Katie Proctor shares her hair raising tale of biking to the birth center while in labor. One contributor recounts how as a little girl she decided to run away by bicycle ...and almost succeeded. Several lusty true stories from our BikeSexuality issue are joined with a handful of tales of a bleak imagined future from Bikes in Space (including an outtake, Sara Tretter's "Henry's New Old Bike," a story that didn't fit in the print version—but was too good not to share).
The audiozine has been lovingly edited and mixed by Jeff Hayes, and much of it was recorded in his cozy studio in Portland.
The funds raised by this project will go to cover our costs, including but never limited to printing and freight for the zine itself (about $1100), postage for shipping out all the rewards (about $400), mailing supplies like tape and envelopes (about $100), and to producing the audiozine (cost as yet unknown...).
Risks and challenges
We've got our system down pretty well by now, and it would take a lot to halt production. That said, sometimes things go more slowly than expected. That's why the rewards are promised in January, though we plan to have this out in December. Thank you!
Learn about accountability on KickstarterQuestions about this project? Check out the FAQ
Support
Funding period
- (28 days)