INTERVIEW: Kate Folk
Sky Daddy
Kate Folk
Random House
An interview with Lauren C. Johnson
In Kate Folk’s debut novel, Sky Daddy (Random House, 2025), a woman named Linda yearns for marriage—with an airplane. In particular, a 737-800 with tail number N92823. Linda's single-minded desire propels her odyssey. By day, she works what most would consider a grueling job as an online content moderator to save up for monthly roundtrip flights from San Francisco International Airport. Will Linda tie the knot in a ceremony that, in her words, others vulgarly refer to as a plane crash?
Another author might have turned Linda’s romantic and sexual attraction to airplanes into a running joke—and don’t get me wrong, there are many laugh-out-loud moments throughout Sky Daddy— but Folk wrote Linda with such depth that she becomes relatable in her complexities. After all, who among us has not longed to be accepted for who we truly are while, at the same time, fearing being seen? Sky Daddy also speaks to the wonder and horror inherent in commercial flying. Folk describes incidents like clear air turbulence, sudden altitude losses, and crashes in technical detail while writing the language of aviation so poetically that the most travel-weary reader will stop to marvel at the fact that we humans have taught ourselves to fly.
I met Folk at Royal Grounds Coffee in the Inner Richmond to talk about Sky Daddy. Folk shared how she developed Linda’s voice, used yearning to drive the plot, wrote to subvert gendered narratives, and so much more. Here are the best parts of our conversation, edited for clarity and brevity.
Lauren C. Johnson: I was impressed with your knowledge of airplanes. I think you nailed the language of aviation in a way that felt deliberate and seamlessly woven into the narrative, from “ailerons” to “takeoff roll.” Did you know much about airplanes before you wrote Sky Daddy? If not, what was that learning process like?
Kate Folk: I definitely had to learn, though I've always been interested in planes. When I started writing Sky Daddy, I began paying attention to the flight safety cards and realized I could learn a lot about any particular plane I was on—both on the card and online. I didn't know how accessible all that information was. It was fun to track a specific plane, see its schedule, and realize that planes are constantly flying above us.
But initially, I became fascinated with planes when a friend texted me a link to a YouTube video on the Flight Channel, which recreates famous airplane incidents. The videos are made with software that creates a basic animation of inside the plane. It's eerie because there are no pilots inside the cockpit. There's no people in the cabin, and the controls just move on their own as the narrator explains what’s happening on the technical level, moment-by-moment. The grammar is a little off on the transcribed text, so it all feels uncanny. That got me thinking about planes as almost sentient, mystical beings.
Then I started thinking about a woman who's in love with a plane. I had seen a documentary about people with objectum sexuality— which I thought was fascinating—and I thought a plane would be a good object to fall in love with because they're so powerful and they have a face. They look kind of like animals.
Once I started writing the book, I saw planes in a whole new way. So now I have my Flightradar24 app, and whenever I see an airplane flying above, I check the app to see where it's going and what type of plane it is.
LCJ: To piggyback on that question, can you share more about your worldbuilding process while you wrote this novel? I know we often associate the term “worldbuilding” with speculative fiction, but that feels like an appropriate word to use here because aviation and tech are their own ecosystems with specific languages/jargon.
KF: The novel is really a character study of someone who's so obsessed with planes that they inform how she sees the world. For example, when Linda meets a new man, she compares him to a model of an airplane. She meets one man who doesn't resemble any plane, and that's the ultimate insult. He's so beneath her that he doesn't even look like a plane. I wanted to seed in details like that but not include too many because it could overwhelm the story if I was too heavy-handed. But that was a fun part of the worldbuilding.
As for Linda's job as a content moderator, I haven't worked that particular job, but I've worked in offices, and workplace relationships are always interesting. One of the things we've lost through remote work is forming friendships with people we would see all the time, though they weren’t people we might normally ever mingle with.
At one point, I had a copywriting job for a startup that was similar in some ways to Acuity, though it wasn't the same type of work. I thought it would be funny to imagine a tech company pretending it's a place like Google with all the great perks, but it isn't actually. They just have the Costco snacks once a quarter, and a really shitty wellness room they let people take breaks in.
I love workplace novels, too. I wanted Linda to have a job that everyone else would think is horrible but that she enjoys and feels good at. It's the first time in her life that her unusual skill set has been used well. I also wanted her to have a job that was separate from planes and the airport so that she could have this default position from which she could long for the planes.
In earlier drafts, she was a flight attendant and married to a pilot. That felt like too much. There has to be a separation between Linda and the plane so that she can yearn for the plane and fulfill her longing when she flies once a month.
LCJ: That makes sense as a way to drive the plot forward—to create the space for yearning.
KF: And the financial distance. Linda doesn't have much money, so she really has to save up for that one flight a month. That’s what she's living for, that one round-trip flight. Some of the tension would be reduced if she had a lot of money.
LCJ: I’m in awe of flight and also afraid of it. Did the tension between fear and awe propel the story for you?
KF: Definitely. There's something about planes that's dangerous. Something feels unnatural about getting on a plane and being that high in the sky, going that fast. The fact is that, for the most part, flying is very safe, but it doesn't seem like it should be. I feel that, as animals, we haven't quite evolved to understand what's happening or to accept that flying is safe because it doesn't feel like something we should be able to do.
So, for me, fear was part of it and the act of surrender that boarding a plane entails. When the flight door is closed, everything is out of my hands. Nothing I do in regular life has the same intensity as submitting to a force greater than myself. And that experience is contrasted with the banality of commercial air travel these days and how it's very uncomfortable and cramped and unpleasant. But at the same time, it's this majestic experience of being miles above the earth.
LCJ: I feel that way about flying, too. I always film the takeoff roll on my phone if I have a window seat. There's something about seeing the plane take off through my phone screen that calms me.
KF: Me too. I love having the window seat. Sometimes I'll take an aisle seat just so I can get to the bathroom easier if it's a longer flight, but if that wasn't an issue, I would always have a window seat. I don’t understand people who buy a window seat just to keep the shade down.
LCJ: Let’s talk about Linda. What was your process for developing her voice as the first-person narrator?
KF: Sky Daddy was always in first person, even from the earliest draft, but it was difficult to get the voice right. Linda’s character could have easily become more nihilistic and cynical, and that didn't really feel right for a character who has this thing about her that she knows is strange but that she doesn't doubt for a second. That ties into the Moby-Dick influence.
I read an abridged children's version of Moby-Dick when I was a kid, and it made a deep impression on me because I remember a detail early in the book where Ishmael is talking about this memory as a kid of being punished for trying to crawl up a chimney. His mom sends him to bed early; it's the middle of the day, and he has to be in bed as if he's sick. He falls into this half sleep, then wakes up and feels a hand holding his above the covers. That made such a deep impression on me, and even now, I never keep my hand outside the covers.
But it wasn’t until 2019 that I read the unabridged version of Moby-Dick. Ishmael’s voice was so buoyant, playful, and full of life and humor, which balances the heaviness of some of the themes of fate and Ahab's monomania in pursuing Moby-Dick, as well as all the religious themes and extremely detailed whale stuff. The book is also a vehicle for Melville to talk about whales in all these different ways, how amazing they are, and how interesting whaling is. I wanted my book to be similar, except about planes—an anatomy of planes and aviation.
Finding that inspiration gave me a new way into the story. I drafted using Moby-Dick as a scaffold a bit too explicitly for a while. But it was useful, especially to generate Linda's voice.
Another inspiration was Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata, which is such a funny, charming book. The narrator is deeply committed to the convenience store where she works. It takes place in Japan, in a culturally conservative milieu where the people around her are getting married and having kids and everyone's telling her, "Don't you want more from life? Are you going to keep working at the convenience store forever?" The narrator feels all this pressure even though she's perfectly happy with her life the way it is and loves the convenience store. The author even has an essay at the end of that book that's basically about someone being sexually obsessed with a convenience store.
LCJ: On that note, Linda’s intense fixation with airplanes is consistent throughout the novel and never abates—from constantly checking Flight Aware like it’s a dating app to fantasizing about N92823 during masturbation and sex. As you were writing, did you have a process for knowing when to push into the absurd and when to hold back?
KF: I spent a full year generating in Linda's voice. I wrote a lot of tangents and passages similar to chapters in Moby-Dick where Ishmael talks about different types of whales. I had a chapter where Linda talked about her opinions on different types of planes, but that ended up on the cutting-room floor.
I had drafted maybe 150 pages that I workshopped during my time in the Stegner program. People liked it but the professor said that those pages felt very episodic, like a picaresque novel that’s not building an arc or leading up to a climax. Each chapter was its own thing. That’s a fine way to write a novel, but it's not conventional in terms of a story that's taking us along a continuous track. So I had to think about the plot and the build. What would be the fullest expression of the premise? An early reader pointed out that I should let Linda fly more because that's her thing. That's the promise of the book.
I had to figure out a way to keep Linda's fixation on flying, the planes, and the fate angle focused rather than going into all these tangents about her job and other things that were possible in the story.
LCJ: I’ve seen some publications describe Sky Daddy as boundary-pushing. That got me thinking about how, under patriarchy, women’s desires are often scrutinized—even the most banal of desires. So, why not lean in all the way and write a novel about a woman who desires airplanes? From this lens, Sky Daddy is a defiant novel. Were the politics of women’s sexuality and desires on your mind as you wrote?
KF: There's a uniqueness to the experience of being a woman who has written a book with anything controversial. People will automatically assume that I'm writing about myself and that I'm saying people should fetishize planes. But that's not what writing a novel is about to me.
I was thinking about patriarchy and gender dynamics and how all the characters in Sky Daddy the book are just as weird as Linda but in different ways. Dave is obsessed with his ex-wife and her new boyfriend, and Karina is obsessed with her fiancé and trying to manipulate him to marry her using vision boards. There's this fetishization of marriage for someone like Karina, but it just happens to be a socially acceptable type of fixation. However, all the characters objectify each other in various ways. Linda's objectification of planes is more literal, but it's the same psychological mechanism of yearning for something that won't love you.
In terms of the gendered narratives, I was thinking about the idea of “men's fiction” versus “women's fiction” and how readers think of women's fiction as domestic. Odysseus goes off to war while Penelope stays home and tends to the domestic sphere. I wanted Linda to get to go on her voyage, in the vein of a “masculine” adventure story.
LCJ: I was struck by how Linda repeatedly references her father's death throughout the novel, despite it having occurred years earlier. This portrayal of grief feels authentic in capturing grief's lingering presence in our lives. Could you share more about grief's role in Sky Daddy and how it shapes Linda's character and relationships?
KF: I wanted Linda's relationship with her father to be her most important relationship. His loss was devastating. But I also wanted to make sure that her plane fetish wasn't a response to that—it existed before. No matter what, she would be this way, not because of an experience.
Linda feels that her dad is the one person who would have understood her if she had dared to explain herself to him, but she never did. So she regrets not having done that. There is a spirituality in how Linda's personal religion is flying as well as her belief that she’s destined to die in a plane crash. Flying is a way to commune with her dad. And not just with her dad but with all the forces we can’t control.
LCJ: Talk to me about Moby-Dick! What was your experience writing a novel in conversation with this classic?
KF: As I read Moby-Dick, I would come upon little details that resonated with Sky Daddy. It did feel like having a conversation across time with Melville. Planes are the whales of the sky, in part because aviation and whaling both revolve around oil.
Whaling is an industry that represents humankind's domination over the natural world. People kill these majestic beings to make money from their oil, and then there’s the grandeur and peril of the ocean. In Moby-Dick, it’s a foolish game for these men to be tangling with a force like the whale and the ocean itself; they're doomed to be destroyed by it. So there was a resonance for me there with flying. Today, flying is a relatively affordable means of transportation, but it doesn't seem like it’s going to be that way forever. Oil is a finite resource.
Initially, I was trying to remake Moby-Dick about planes, but you can't do that because we're living in a different time. So I had to make my own modern version and let the scaffolding fall away. There are still bits of an older voice in there, but for the most part, I modernized this story and took away some of Linda's more highfalutin vocabulary and syntax from previous drafts.
LCJ: Linda’s belief that airplanes have a unique kind of sentience reminds me of the short story, “Moist House” in your collection, Out There. In which ways is Sky Daddy in conversation with Out There?
KF: One of the critiques I’ve seen of Out There is that the stories are about women chasing after awful men. I see that there is a lot of that in Out There, and maybe those stories reflected what fascinated me at the time. I think I’ve outgrown that a bit now that I'm older, so Sky Daddy moves in the opposite direction. This novel is about a woman who doesn't want anything to do with men—or people, really. Well, she does, but she's fixated on something completely different. That felt fun to me, in an inside-joke-with-myself way.
It’s true that in Out There, especially in the blot stories, a woman falls in love with what she thinks is a man but is actually advanced AI. But I've always been fixated on the idea of objects having sentience and souls. Even the first stories I wrote as a kid were all about my stuffed rabbit, Peter, which I'm sure is very common, considering The Velveteen Rabbit.
LCJ: That story still makes me cry.
KF: It's probably the saddest story I’ve ever read. And I've always carried that with me, this belief that love makes you real.
