By Rege Behe, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, August 1, 2010
"I just felt like I hadn't exhausted everything that happened up there," Lori Jakiela says.
Jakiela is not only referring to the period she lived in New York, but also the time she spent "in the air" as a flight attendant. In her 2006 memoir, "Miss New York Has Everything," the Trafford native wrote about the seemingly glamorous world of air travel, how everything she sought in terms of career and family turned out to be at home after all.
In "Red Eye," a collection of poetry, Jakiela, who lives in Trafford and teaches at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and Chatham University, revisits these themes, using poetry as the delivery system.
"It's taken me all these year to write about flying and that world," says Jakiela, who last worked as a flight attendant just before 9/11. "I just had more stories to tell."
Jakiela, 46, embraces the challenge of various writing forms. In addition to poetry, she writes for magazines, is revising a novel and working on another memoir. But poems, she says, "let the air in a little bit. I get so much joy from writing a poem, if writing can ever be called joyful."
Jakiela previously published a poetry collection, "The Regulars," nine years ago. Those poems, she admits, were mostly uniform in style. Since then, Jakiela has allowed herself to be more experimental in "Red Eye."
"The Flight Attendant at the Holiday Inn Thinks of Borges" is a mere two lines:
I've grown accustomed to my face
growing old in so many mirrors.
"If the poem needs to run two lines, if the poem needs to run two pages .... I feel freer, when it comes down to it, to make those choices," Jakiela says. "Or to let the poems make those choices for me, and to not be so heavy-handed."
Other poems in the collection recall some of the anecdotes that populated "Miss New York ... ." She writes about her neighborhood in Queens, the diminishing returns of constant travel, and the constant challenge of dealing with the public.
In "Training Film #1," she writes "'Passengers are animals,' our flight instructor says./'Never show fear.'"
Jakiela admits sometimes her various forms of writing bleed into each other.
"There is the idea that you steal from yourself sometimes," she says. "Or you explore a moment in a poem where there is a backstory, but you don't want to get into that in a poem."
What poems especially allow her to do is isolate a single strand of an idea into a cogent, illuminative piece.
A poem is "just a moment, and I'm really interested in those," she says. "And I think a lot of that comes from prose writing, because my interest in prose writing is to have these linked moments that I can string together."
Further balance is required to juggle the needs of family -- Jakiela is the mother of two young children -- and her work. She admits to being consumed at times by the need to write, even though it comes at the expense of time with her family
"It's constant guilt about my work and family and writing," she says. "It's constantly feeling that pull. Sometimes, I think it would be so much easier if I didn't write, but I can't. I'm miserable and I can't focus and I'm no good to anyone. Sometimes, I look at writing as public service to my family. They don't see it that way, but it makes me a better person, otherwise."
Jakiela worked as a flight attendant for almost seven years. Given "Red Eye" is her second work dominated by that experience, it might seem to be the most important period of her life. But Jakiela instead prefers to look on her time in New York as a transitional stage.
"I find myself now more writing about where I am in the moment," she says, "as a mother back in (my) hometown of Trafford. I don't think (New York) will define me for the rest of my life. It was important, but everybody has multiple moments like that in their lives. Not one, but a lot of them."
From TribLive published on Sunday, August 1, 2010