Today we’d like to introduce you to Lori Jakiela.

Hi Lori, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

I’ve loved words and books as far back as I can remember. When I was very young, I’d beg my mother and grandmother to read to me. Sometimes, if they were tired and didn’t feel like another round of Green Eggs and Ham, they’d say, “I can’t. I lost my glasses.” And so I believed that if you had glasses, you could read. That was the magic. But then I got glasses and started kindergarten and didn’t learn to read right away. I was furious! Anyway, I think writers may be born that way. Our love of story. Our love of books. Our understanding that words can shape the world, that words have power. Also, I was terrible at math and so words and stories were the only way I could make sense of things. I’m still like that, even though my family trusts me to do our taxes. Thanks, Turbotax!

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?

Being a writer is kind of a ridiculous pursuit for someone who comes from a working-class background.

I come from a working-class background. My mother was a nurse. My father was a machinist. They didn’t have the money to support someone who wanted to live “an artist’s life.”

I put that in quotes because I mean it.

How silly is that idea of a working-class person aspiring to be, dear god, not only a writer but a poet? Poetry was my first love, whatever. I went to graduate school for poetry, but that’s jumping ahead.

How silly is it for anyone not born into leisure or, dear god now, the billionaire class, to aspire to a life like that?

How arrogant to even dream such a thing?

Back when teachers and relatives asked what I wanted to do with my life, I might as well have said, “I want to be an apple.” That’s how silly and delusional it would seem to say, “I want to be a writer.”

My parents, though.

Bless them.

Bless them again.

I was adopted when I was one year old. My parents had no idea what was in store for them. Nature/nurture. Nurture/nature. Who knows.

“I don’t know where you came from,” my mother would sometimes say.

She didn’t mean to be cruel. I didn’t know where I came from, either. We were very different, my parents and I. But they loved me and encouraged me and supported me anyway.

Bless them.

My parents bought me my first typewriter when I was graduating high school.

Remember typewriters? How I love them still

That gift from my parents–a Royal manual typewriter, grey, with a carrying case and black-and-red ribbon–was such an act of love. It said, “We believe in you, even if we can’t understand what the hell you’re doing with your life.” It said, “We want you to do you, even though we wish you’d make better, more practical choices.”

How lucky I feel to have been loved like that.

Making money, surviving while trying to do this thing I love, this one thing I’m a bit good at–that has always been a struggle.

I’ve worked many kinds of jobs–waitressing (of course! what artist doesn’t?); journalism; public relations; more waitressing; catering; flight attendant-ing; it goes on and on.

Now I teach. I teach writing at a branch campus of a major university and don’t make what my students might think I make. It’s a struggle, always. I still do catering on the side. I pick up waitressing gigs. My husband is a writer, too. He teaches at the same place I do. We cobble a beautiful life together. We take care of our kids, who are now in their 20s, bless them too. Together, my husband and I have published 18 books. None of them make much money. Still. Still.

My husband and I realize, I think, now at this late stage in our lives, that we’ll never get ahead in the ways that the world thinks about people getting ahead. But we keep writing, creating. Our kids are following their own bliss. Our daughter is an actress. Our son is an entrepreneur. We keep hoping love and hard work mean everything.

And besides. No one ultimately gets ahead in life. Not really. So doing something you love, something that might make the world just a bit better, is fine.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?

One Halloween, my mother–who was very nervous and anxious–planned a surprise Halloween party for me. I was, maybe, six. My costume that year was Casper the Friendly Ghost. It was one of those cheap 1970s costumes–plastic mask with the elastic band that was too tight around your head; hard to see out of the squinty eye-holes, totally flammable ghost-cape. My mom, though, had worked so hard. She planned games. She peeled grapes and put blindfolds on all of us. She had us put our hands in bowls full of peeled grapes and let us think they were eyeballs. She made spaghetti and put it in the freezer. Blindfolded, it felt like the intestines of the dead. We bobbed for apples. We did “The Monster Mash.” We played Hot Potato with a wind-up plastic potato that sounded like a ticking bomb. My mom, so sad and so distant most of the time, seemed almost joyful. The way we squealed and laughed. The way she pulled everything off. The way I was so surprised. I hope she remembered that. We never talked about it later in life, but I wish we did. It meant a lot.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://lorijakiela.net
• Facebook: lorijakiela