what does your ambition feel like?
a writing prompt, featuring poet Emily Mohn-Slate, Rainsford Stauffer, & so many other smart folks rethinking ambition
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It feels like everyone I know is talking about ambition, whether we’re losing it or owning it or reclaiming it as we emerge from camel mode.
Rainesford Stauffer’s new book, All the Gold Stars: Reimagining Ambition and the Ways We Strive, has sparked great conversations about how to rethink what we mean by ambition. In an interview with
at Culture Study, Stauffer suggests we can reframe ambition so it’s not just about external accomplishments, like a promotion or an award, but about “where we put dedication, care, and passion.” So you could be direct your ambition toward your friendships, your community, your hobby. One piece of advice that I think will really resonate with writers:Be ambitious about the process, not just the outcome. (To use my own hobby as an example, when I bake, I put on some good music, I take my time, I eat too much batter. That way, if the recipe implodes–like when I accidentally mixed up powdered sugar and flour–the whole thing isn’t a wash.)
Today, for our first little love, I want to take a different tack: how does your ambition feel?
A piece of a poem, Emily Mohn-Slate’s “Feed,” to get us started. (You can read the whole thing at Muzzle, or in The Long Devotion, or in Emily’s gorgeous book The Falls.)
When I first came across “Feed,” I read it as a poem about the exhaustion of early motherhood, the feeling that someone always needs something from you. But when my Long Devotion co-editor Emily Pérez and I shared her poem in a workshop we taught last spring at The Writers House at Rutgers-Camden, something else came to the surface.
It’s a poem about ambition and how it refuses to be quieted, how it “bats at my knees and I toss it scraps.” Does that resonate for you? If you’ve been thinking about ambition, why not try to consider how your ambition feels?
a prompt for you: What does your ambition feel like?
If you’re not sure where to get started, where do you feel it in your body? (Or is it zipping in from elsewhere, as in Emily’s poem? or maybe dozing somewhere under a blanket?) Does it have a color, a texture, a scent, or a taste?
(You’d be welcome to share an image or a snippet in the comments, if you want!)
even more to love, from the Write More archive
following Annie Dillard’s advice to spend it all
on not approaching revision “like babies with hatchets,” with advice from Ross Gay
Write More, Be Less Careful is a newsletter about why writing is hard & how to do it anyway. You can find my books here and read other recent writing here. If you’d like occasional dog photos, glimpses of my walks around town, and writing process snapshots, find me on instagram.
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the "hoping it will reward me" of the poem really resonates.
my ambition feels anticipatory. that's all i can get in touch with at the moment, but i love the prompt.