The Ghost in the Machine
by Nonfiction Editor Steph George
“Ghost in the Machine” by Jerry King / Flickr Images
As many of us prepare for this year’s annual AWP conference, I find it difficult not to feel a little wary as I scroll through sessions about how to further our writing careers. Perhaps I am alone in this feeling, but I sense that I am not.
For the previous six years I worked in publishing, and for the last three of those years I experienced first-hand the devastating impact of corporate interest, large company mergers, and a focus on profit over substance, all of which played no small part in my decision to walk away. Last year saw months-long strikes from the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA). The chief concerns? Fair pay, copyright, and generative AI. Just before the onset of the WGA strike, NPR laid off 10% of its staff, including several writers, and canceled three popular podcasts.
The university in which this journal is housed just suffered a massive round of layoffs, reducing the number of staff, faculty, and services, all while preserving administrative budgets. As a result, we have lost some of our most valued creative spaces, such as the campus art museum and the center for excellence and innovation in teaching and learning. This follows trends in higher ed, like West Virginia University, who last year eliminated 28 majors and fired 143 faculty members, many of which were from the humanities where us writerly types tend to hide away.
When there’s less and less money every year allocated to creative endeavors, and the threat of AI looms larger, I have to ask myself: why stick it out?
On a phone call with a friend recently I expressed my fear about pretty much everything mentioned above. “I wouldn’t worry,” he told me. “It’s all the stuff they can’t outsource. We’re like the ghost in the machine.” Dramatic? Maybe. But it’s a dramatic time, and we are writers, after all. More importantly, it’s true. The machine needs us, not the other way around. Put another way, the structures we function within today may not exist tomorrow, but our talents and energies are withstanding.
I’m not just placating. New colleges and universities continue to open up. Magazines, podcasts, and publishing houses are started seemingly every day (just take a look at the number of vendors at AWP). WGA and SAG-AFTRA won their contracts. Many of the freelancer communities that I am a part of are actively developing ways to protect our craft while not becoming total Luddites (who, incidentally, were pretty cool).
With an old order struggling to hang on, we have the opportunity now more than ever to strike out on our own and get as creative, weird, and convicted as we want. Go start the project you’ve been sitting on for forever. Write a zine. Get lost in your hyper-specific studies. Don’t lose steam. Whatever engine we inhabit, we will make the gears turn.
Steph George is the Nonfiction Editor of Barnstorm Journal and an MFA Nonfiction Creative Writing student at the University of New Hampshire. She’s a freelance writer and audio producer in Dover, NH.