Yesterday, my friend and colleague The Rejectionist wrote about a presentation Matthew Stadler made at the Henry back in July (here's my account). In the process, The Rejectionist made several sweeping claims about the Northwest and ambition:
...there is something, also, about ambition that is not welcome on the west coast; admitting to ambition is like saying you are a Republican, or in favor of sweatshops—it is unseemly and a little grotesque, that kind of desire. We spent a lot of our life pretending we were not ambitious, and then we came out here, and this city took away all pretense of everything other than the stuff we are made of; and, to be frank, we are a little on the ruthless side, and so are all the people we love the most. Ambition is a thing that you have to surround yourself with, or else stamp out in yourself altogether, because there is no good in being ruthless in a city of gentle people. New York is many things, a lot of them nearly unbearable, but gentle is certainly not one of them.
That's a bold statement, and I'm not entirely sure it's true. I agree with the concept that ambition is basically another kind of currency in cities on the east coast (and New York most of all). But I don't think Northwest writers and other lit-minded folks lack ambition. I think they just have a different (and healthier) sense of scale than the east coast lit scene*.
Think of it: New York City has, for decades, been home to the biggest publishing houses in the western hemisphere. Over the years, those houses have gotten bigger and bigger in scope and scale and audience. And you may argue that the billion tiny presses and lit magazines that are formed every week out in Brooklyn are antithetical to the big publishing houses, but I contend that most of those small pursuits require the huge publishing houses and would not exist without the giants dropping crumbs from their dinner table. You can't set up in the shadow of giants without keeping those giants in mind, somehow. You're mimicking their patterns on a tiny scale.
The idea of success in New York has grown into something unsustainably huge.
Two million dollar book deals are insane. They're the pursuit of a crazy person. They raise the bar of success so high that your ambition has to grow to astronomical levels. That ambition has to consume your life. Those dreams of conquering the world draw some of the best people in the world to battle it out in New York, and the continually refreshed pool of hungry talent is frothing with the remains of the weak.
The elephant in Seattle's room is Amazon. And while Amazon is built on the scale of a giant-killing giant, it delivers a tiny, personal experience to readers. It offers the opportunity for authors to sell a couple dozen copies of their self-published memoirs at very little cost. (There's a reason why two Seattle bookstores have Espresso Book Machines; it's because we understand that most books don't need to have tens of thousands of copies moldering in a warehouse somewhere, waiting to be remaindered and pulped.) Seattle authors don't dream of million-dollar book deals and appearances on vapid New York-based news shows. They dream of carving a life out where they can write what they want to write, and where they can find the audience that's just right for them.
I see lots of ambitious projects in Seattle—some that work, others that don't—but the difference is that they're not made with everyone in mind. They're not hyperbolic in the way that New York's ambition machine tends to flavor projects. They're smaller, and happily so, because they understand that happiness has value. That's a big part of the reason why when I was presented with the opportunity to choose between New York or Seattle eleven years ago, I chose the city that was built to human scale.
* I'm going to limit my conversation about ambition here to books and writing, because that's what I know best. but I think that these statements could be applied to just about any creative pursuit—fashion, visual art, music.
