Trauma in Publishing

Abstract

We live in an extraordinary time in human history. Arguably, the most significant social changes have taken place in recent decades, including changes in policy and attitudes towards human rights, how we educate and treat children, towards sexual violence and abuse, sexuality and gender identification, to name just a few. In Australia, we have witnessed public responses through Royal Commissions and other public inquiries that have given voice to generations of people whose suffering had been silenced by formal and informal social mechanisms. Now, in the twenty-first century, the proliferation of new technologies, social media and social campaigns designed to engage people online as well as offline have empowered citizens to take control of their narratives, to tell their own stories. In the published literature, a great many have begun to reveal the nature and extent of traumas experienced by individuals, families, groups and entire communities. In the publishing industry, scant attention is given to the occupational risks faced by the workforce charged with disseminating these trauma stories: the editors, literary agents, proofreaders, publicists and other publishing personnel who are repeatedly exposed to trauma narratives. Even as publishing facilitates healing through story, it is also perpetuating—or at the very least enabling—the transmission of trauma: from author to publishing personnel, and quite possibly also from industry to reader. This paper posits that publishing as an industry is awash with trauma. Through the perspective of an industry insider, it explores the three faces of trauma in the publishing context: recounting trauma as a vehicle for healing and reconciliation, the trauma narrative as a commodity and vicarious trauma as an occupational hazard.