Big Sister Energy
The Letter From The Editor as it appears in the June 2026 issue.
I have this running joke that Seth Rogen is my brother. Not because we share parents, but because we were both nominated for the same literary award (me in 2018 and he in 2022). This connects us on some cosmic plane of losers for which I’m grateful to hold a membership. I have a fantasy of sitting around a campfire with him—big sister and little brother—swapping stories about what it feels like to stand in a fancy room with fancy people, to hear the MC say, “And the nominees are…” and then “And the winner is…” and the crushing weight of it not being your name but the warm gratitude to even be included, because the work of your hands struck a deep chord with another human.
Canada boasts a lot of creative treasures, and I count Seth among them. In a recent interview with Brut., Seth spoke out against the use of AI in both movie making and screen writing. “If your instinct is to use AI and not go through that process, you shouldn’t be a writer, because then you’re not writing.” And then, almost as an aside: “the idea of a tool that makes me write less is not appealing to me, because I like writing.”
And with that, my baby brother said exactly what I’ve been thinking since the threat of AI began peeking over the frame of my laptop.
Writing, painting, sculpting, photographing… ultimately we do it for the journey, not the destination. The joy of creativity comes in the execution. Yes, it’s rewarding to have a finished product, but nothing can replicate the rush of discovery as we chase that finish line. Time and time again I’ve spoken with creatives who greet the end of a project with something that can only be called grief. We toil over something for days/weeks/years, only to let it go. Creativity is like parenting: you raise it up the best you can, on your own merits, and then you release it into the world. You let go of what you’ve nurtured in the hope that it might serve someone else. What was yours, is no longer yours—and that’s a heavy privilege we carry as creative beings.
Utilizing AI to increase creative output is ceding autonomy. You can’t give what you never had in the first place.
I am not anti-technology but I am against anything that strips both the joy and the hardship away. Any time I dedicate myself to a creative project, I end up learning more about myself. I unlock new ideas; I scale new mountains; I discover new colours.
“Stop and smell the roses” isn’t a throw-away cliché, it’s a lifestyle, and I worry it’s getting forgotten with all the pressure of more-more-more. Can a computer smell a rose? No. Only you can unlock its meaning.
It took me ten years to write my last book; meanwhile, “authors” are spitting out five books a month and self-publishing them on Amazon. I’m not better than them, but I am trying to do something meaningful. A thing born of love is a thing worthy of legacy—it’s why we’re still reading Shakespeare and still crying over van Gogh.
So think of this as your big sister talking, not because I have all the answers, but because I’ve stumbled through enough of the questions to know that the stumbling is the whole point. Create at your own pace. Embrace the mess. Whatever you produce will shine because you poured your light into it. It will carry something no algorithm ever could: the unmistakable fingerprint of a human heart.
Keep going. My little brother and I are rooting for you.
Alanna Rusnak, Blank Spaces Editor in Chief
