You'll Love the Way We Fly
An Interview
with author Lori Jakiela

Lori Jakiela is a people watcher. Although she notes that she may not be able to tell you what she had for lunch or what day it is, she has an eye for details that go unnoticed by many. "I think live people are more fun to watch than reality TV,” she explains.  “I love to hang out in restaurants and dive bars and eavesdrop."

As is evident from "You'll Love the Way We Fly," her time working on an airplane gave her many things to write about. "My flight attendant friends and I used to joke that the plane was really just one big psycho/social experiment gone terribly wrong. A giant flying test tube. It's a good place for a writer, though. A completely unnatural/natural environment. Lots and lots of stories up there."

She recalls some particularly harrowing flying experiences.  “I've had passengers throw sandwiches at my head. I've been squirted with mayonnaise.  One time a guy in a business suit actually licked me. He came up behind me and licked me on the neck, which wasn't an easy thing to do, considering I was wearing one of those fancy flight attendant scarves and all. I've had to break up senior-citizen fistfights. I've had to break up people having sex during take-off. It's not completely normal up there. Which, even on a bad day, always made for a good story.”

Experiences such as these have given Jakiela an eye for particulars.  "I think the little details of people's lives—the things they carry in their purses, the way their hands move, the way they sit, the words they say or don't say, what they eat, the way they put on lipstick, the way they hold a pen—can, if you pay attention, offer these wonderful windows, these chances to see someone, a stranger, even, in a way that's intimate and meaningful and human."

She credits her ability to capture these intimate life moments to her initial training as a journalist and poet. “For me,” she notes, “both journalism and poetry are about taking in those luminous details so that you can get to that one true thing, the truth about a person or a moment.  These tiny moments where the windows open up are very important to me. I like feeling connected to a kind of broad humanity.”

Finding the truth is not always easy, however.  “It's a challenge, really, because you can't make things connect or smooth out the edges in any way. You have to teach yourself to see the connections, to see—at least in memoir—yourself as subject, your life as art. It's a cool creative process, and a tortuous one, too. But when things snap into place, there's this amazing clarity, this moment when the light just comes in and, for a second, I'll understand something new about myself or other people. And I love that. Clarity.”

Jakiela has a particular affinity for creative nonfiction.  “I do research whenever I can—old photos, news clippings, family interviews and such. I make rambling free-write lists of things I remember. I check out everything I can. And then I just take all these stories, these details, these voices, and sort of stuff them into a big bag. Okay…the bag's figurative. Usually there are just these incredible piles of paper and things strewn out on my office floor. Then I love crawling around with them, trying to find connections between things. I try to discover what all these moments mean, what they say about my life or about the lives of other people I know. To find, in short, what's true.

“My point always has been, why would I make things up when the world is right there, and what's real is so much more interesting to me than anything I could invent, at least at this point?”

—Corey Ginsber