Jakiela is a master of an essay form that is distinctly her own, a kind of integrated collage style that brings together her background as a journalist and the author of collections of poetry, weaving together quotes, facts, musings, digressions, and stories.
By Nancy Grace McCabe
In her most recent collection of essays, All Skate: True Stories from Middle Life, Lori Jakiela revisits some of the territory covered by previous books in new essays that are irresistible: laugh-out-loud funny, full of precise observations, and like all of her work, generous and wise.
Previously, Jakiela wrote about her job in her twenties as a flight attendant (Miss New York Has Everything), her working class background and series of past jobs (Portrait of the Artist as a Bingo Worker) her sometimes conflicted feelings about her place in her family but her deep love for her parents (The Bridge to Take When Things Get Serious), her adoption and process of tracking down her birth family (Belief Is Its Own Kind of Truth, Maybe), and her bout with breast cancer (They Write Your Name on a Grain of Rice).
In All Skate, Jakiela turns her attention to untold stories from these life stages and preoccupations through the lens of middle age. Jakiela is a master of an essay form that is distinctly her own, a kind of integrated collage style that brings together her background as a journalist and the author of collections of poetry, weaving together quotes, facts, musings, digressions, and stories, pulling us in with opening lines like, “One mid-pandemic day, because I love my daughter and because I have what my mother said is the common sense of a doorknob, I found myself sprawled on a tennis court trying not to pass out.”
All Skate opens with a lovely micro-essay, “The Art of the Take-Off,” that summarizes the philosophy that pervades so many of her essays. “I loved and still love every impossible thing about flight,” Jakiela observes. “I love the way something so heavy can become, in an instant, seemingly weightless. If something so huge can go airborne with the weight of all those human hearts wrapped inside, anything is possible.”
Stories about her work as a flight attendant continue with “The Art of the Carry-on” and “You Can Tell a Lot about People from the Way They Behave on Airplanes,” a particularly timely tribute to Jimmy Carter In the wake of his recent death. Writing about her six Irish accountant roommates during her flight attendant years allows Jakiela to segue into themes surrounding her own roots, her adoption, and the family she has created.
Her portraits of her children are funny and tender, from her son’s habitual bemusement at the family in which he has landed to her daughter’s zest for life and hilarious sense of nostalgia, even at the age of four. Jakiela weaves together images from parenting and her flight attendant years, writing, “I tell my daughter to pull up, like an airplane, to keep her from crashing, to save her from the gravity of the world.”
Jakiela has an eye for quirky detail and striking metaphor, such as her recurring descriptions of body types: a boy who “was built like an eraser, stubby, with a square head and buzz-cut hair,” a former boyfriend who “was a cop . . . and looked like an action figure in his uniform,” and the list of boys in her humorous essay “Boy Crazy, or Sex and Death from Kindergarten to Grade Eight.” She remembers boys who were “built like a pork chop,” and “built like a waving inflatable arm-flailing tube man, the kind found outside used car dealerships and WalMart grand openings.”
Jakiela describes her relationship with the action-figure ex-boyfriend as one of those that “worked the way things work when the person next to you on the bus doesn’t smell like moldy broccoli or talk to his sandwich”—a low bar indeed, if one that will be familiar to many readers. By the end of the essay she demonstrates her particular skill, in the midst of humor, at hitting readers with poignant moments we didn’t see coming: “’Love you,’ Diego and I said to each other, not ‘I love you,’ but ‘love you.’ As in someone, someday, will.”
That moment resonates with the full, rich life Jakiela has made for herself as she writes about an early job in an essay that becomes a tribute to Penn State running back Franco Harris; roller-skating with her daughter during the pandemic, a venture that doesn’t end well; memories of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference; and a portrait of Krick’s Tavern in Trafford, PA.
Jakiela’s wisdom and humor come through in both small details and profound statements. A professor, she pokes fun at her profession in a line that takes a serious turn: “Life is fleeting. Nothing will give us tenure in this world.” But Jakiela never takes herself too seriously, and her transitions from light to profound and back again are one of the many pleasures of these engaging essays, as in this passage where she considers the birds that share her first name:
“Lories are tiny, bright-colored. They love sugar. Lories, bird watchers say, are intense personalities, the party people of the avian kingdom. High spirited, high energy. Confetti with wings. Rainbows on meth. Lories love nectar, which means they have mainly liquid poop, which, according to experts, lorries love to shoot great distances.”
Nancy McCabe directs the writing program for Pitt’s regional campus in Bradford. She also teaches in the low-residency graduate program at Spalding University, has three times been a writer-in-residence at Chautauqua, and has taught classes for the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, Craft Talks, and Muse Writing and Creative Support. Nancy is the author of eight books, including From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood; Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir; the comic novel The Pamela Papers: A Mostly E-pistolery Story of Academic Pandemic Pandemonium; and the young adult novel Vaulting through Time. Her debut middle grade novel, Fires Burning Underground, launches in April, and her craft book Creating Some Measure of Beauty: The Healing Power of the Artful Essay is under contract with University of New Mexico Press.
