Write for The Human Residue
First-person essays on the moments the machines reached your work The Human Residue publishes one kind of story: what happened when the machine reached your work, and what that did to the person stand
First-person essays on the moments the machines reached your work
The Human Residue publishes one kind of story: what happened when the machine reached your work, and what that did to the person standing closest to it. This is an open call for that story. I want yours.
Maybe the reach arrived as an email, a client of nine years writing to say the copy will be generated in-house from now on. Maybe it was quieter: the afternoon you checked a model’s draft against your own and couldn’t decide, for one long minute, which was better. The essay I’m asking for starts at that moment and refuses to look away from it.
I edit this publication from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where I’ve spent thirty-four years playing in the same band and the last ten coaching a sport my state didn’t offer when my son wanted to learn it. I know what a slow-earned skill costs. That’s the qualification I care about, in myself and in you.
What we publish
• Personal and confessional essays on the lived experience of AI displacement
• Short first-person dispatches from your profession, for our Field Notes column
• Contrarian but defensible first-person arguments
• Interviews with people whose work AI is displacing
• Reflective essays on what still can’t be faked
Every format shares one gate: first person, built on something that happened, to you or to someone you sat across from. Specificity outranks scope. “AI will change everything” is a headline to argue with, not an essay. The morning your job description changed is an essay.
The human standard
The prose must be yours. Medium itself calls AI-generated writing ineligible for distribution, and it can cost a writer their Partner Program enrollment. A publication named The Human Residue holds a harder line than the platform does: any AI involvement in your piece gets disclosed inside the piece, in plain language. Quoted a model? Attribute it by name. Used an AI-generated image? Those are welcome here, disclosed in the caption. Undisclosed AI use is the one disqualifier this publication will not carry.
What we won’t take
AI news coverage. Prompt and tool listicles. Third-person think-pieces about “society.” Doom with no first-person anchor. Blanket despair and empty reassurance get cut with the same red pen.
How to submit
1. Follow The Human Residue on Medium.
2. Leave a response on our founding post, or message me, and I’ll add you as a writer.
3. First time here? Send one sentence naming the moment your piece is built on.
4. In your draft, open the “…” menu next to Publish, choose Add to publication, and pick The Human Residue.
You don’t need a media job or an AI background. Lived experience is the entry fee. One money note for newer Medium writers: a story must be behind the paywall to earn, for you and for any editor who works on it. An unlocked story pays nobody, no matter how far it travels.
The machines will keep getting better at the tasks. No essay here needs to relitigate that. What no model can produce is the person the task happened to. Send me that person.
If you want future calls and new essays in your inbox, subscribe to The Human Residue newsletter and follow the publication on Medium.
Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA & PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.
SOURCES
Medium Help Center. (2026). Which stories are eligible to be Boosted? Retrieved July 28, 2026, from https://help.medium.com/hc/en-us/articles/26716922635159-Which-stories-are-eligible-to-be-Boosted
Medium Staff. (2026, July 1). New: A program to pay publication editors. The Medium Blog. https://medium.com/blog/new-a-program-to-pay-publication-editors-d9c4f1ed40d8