Forty years of listening
to other people’s stories.

I have been a flight attendant since February 1986, when I started with Tempe-based America West Airlines. Four decades later I am still flying, still working the aisle every week, and I have written almost everything I have ever published in the spaces around that job — in hotel rooms, on layovers, in the quiet hour before a morning departure.

People tell flight attendants things. Thirty thousand feet does something to the ordinary rules about what you keep to yourself. For forty years I have been handed the middle of strangers’ lives — the grief they are flying toward, the job they just lost, the person they are about to marry — and then watched them walk up the jet bridge and disappear. It turns out that is an education. It is certainly how I learned to listen.

The training

I went back to school for it. I earned my journalism degree from the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University, from the fall of 2006 to the summer of 2009 — twenty years into my flying career, and rather later than most of my classmates. In 2007, while I was still a student there, a feature of mine took first place for Best Human Interest Feature from the Communication Workers of America. Years afterward, during the pandemic that emptied the skies I work in, I took a master’s in journalism at NYU, through its American Journalism Online program, from 2020 to 2023.

Between and around those, I reported. I wrote features forGreen Living Magazine and AZ-Lifestyle, covered sustainability and business for Climate & Capital Media, wrote criticism forThe Click, and produced work for corporate clients.

I also ghostwrote a memoir. The Widow’s Tale is Shelly Fitzloff’s story, and I never expected my first book to be a memoir, let alone someone else’s. Writing a life you did not live, in a voice that is not yours, turns out to be the most useful training a novelist could ask for.

Then I found the work I loved most, which was the smallest. I joinedWrangler News, a community paper covering Tempe and Chandler, and wrote about robotics teams and bus drivers and a man who came home after thirteen thousand miles. I became its Executive Editor. When the paper closed, my piece ran on page three of the final issue. It was about listening to other people’s stories, which is the only thing I have ever really written about.

BJW Post

In 2010 I started my own paper. I named it for my initials and for the oldest word in American newspapering, and I gave it a masthead line that was also an acrostic — Blogger, Journalist, Writer. For ten years I filed to it between trips, irregularly and honestly, and it is where I learned my own voice before anyone was paying me for it. That archive is still here.

Now

I am writing novels. The first is with agents. It is fiction, and while its protagonist happens to work at altitude, it is not a book about aviation — it is a book about the things people carry and where they set them down.

I am also a wife and a mother, which is not a footnote to any of the above but the frame around it. Most of what I have written was written after everyone else had gone to bed.

For enquiries — editorial, speaking, or otherwise — write to barbi@barbiwalkerwalsh.com.