"This paper, first delivered at the AAWP Conference 'Lighting the Fuse' in Adelaide 1998, is in roughly three parts. The first is a necessarily roundabout approach to what I mean by "The Ghost": it is not Creative Writing as such, but it inhabits and animates it. The second involves a definition of "The Machine" which, likewise, is not the academic system of my subtitle, but relates to it. The third part of my paper focuses on the subtitle itself: Creative Writing and the Academic System."--Author's abstract