Ambition

I’ve been dying for something to spark me. Holy cow. It’s only been a week but it’s been a long week. Now I’ve got a long weekend ahead of me, the first in what seems like a few years, and I need the spark. I need to get back into the zone. I need to breathe and find my self again. Where did I go?

It was a big week in my household. Angie and Henry both started school. Changes in routine all around. Commotion.

So I get out of my zone with all that. Out of touch with the “me” that I like and feel happy to be. The “me” who feels I’ve got some freedom. Get that freedom feeling going and it doesn’t matter so much what I’m doing. It is hard to know where that feeling goes or even why. Yes, there’s the pull of obligations going in five directions, but I’m not sure they’re the cause of why I feel so enslaved.

I didn’t get inspired this morning by anything lofty at all, but by a book review of a Minnesota author, shown sitting on Brighton Beach in Duluth (where I’d thought of going for a getaway this weekend only to find all the rooms booked). It was a case of something that felt a little like envy at this woman’s ability to state her ambition without shame. She says, “I was going to keep writing until I sold something if it took until I was 90. I wasn’t content with self-publishing. I wanted a big New York house and I wanted to see my book in every Barnes & Noble and independent bookstore in the country.”

Mary Ann Grossman, who didn’t review The Given Self, even though she’d said she would and even though I’m a Minnesota author (and it feels like she reviews everything by Minnesota authors), ends the article by saying that’s exactly what this author did. This ambitious writer sold her book to a New York house and got it in the bookstores.

That, too, is what I feel wistful for, that feeling of doing what I set out to do (even though I don’t exactly work that way – with a feeling of setting out to accomplish something). Maybe that is what ambition is -- “setting out to accomplish something” and why I’m saying I feel something “like” envy.

I don’t set out to accomplish anything.

What this writer has accomplished is like the dream of my youth, my imaginary forays into fame, my seat in the chair next to Johnny Carson. When I hear of such things I remember those dreams. ‘Oh,’ I think, ‘how lovely it was when it was so straightforward. When all I wanted to be was one of those New York published writers.’

Now I just want to be me.


Quote from "Booksellers are loving Duluth author Wendy Webb's 'Tale of Halcyon Crane' by Mary Ann Grossman, 4-9-2010, p 9A