Author from Pittsburgh deals with “Rust Belt feminism” and the idea of ​​home

Sherrie Flick is a longtime resident of the South Side Slopes, about 30 miles from her hometown of Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

But in the meantime, she traveled many more miles across the country. Those journeys, and how they led her back to Pittsburgh and a new sense of home, are the focus of her new collection of essays, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist (University of Nebraska Press).

Flick is an acclaimed short story writer who specializes in short stories in collections such as Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc. She is also an editor, author of the novel Reconsidering Happiness, a lecturer at Chatham University, and a former co-organizer of the long-running Gist Street Reading Series in Pittsburgh.

In Beaver Falls, her youth coincided with the collapse of the steel industry. She enrolled at the University of New Hampshire in the mid-1980s and, after graduating, moved first to San Francisco and then to Lincoln, Nebraska, before moving to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s.

She said her new book begins with the question “Why am I here?” – more specifically, why on the South Side Slopes, in the home she has shared with her husband for 25 years.

“You know, why am I surrounded by all these city stairs?” she said. “Why did I choose to live in this extremely remote and difficult to access place?”

Practiced when she was in Leave Places, she realized that she hadn’t really written about Western Pennsylvania, the state where she had decided to stay.

“And so I kind of said openly, ‘I’m going to write about this place. And first I’m going to write about my neighborhood,'” she said. She wanted to explore what she calls “the idea of ​​’how can you stay?'”

A sort of memoir in standalone essays, “Homing” covers many topics, including Flick’s awakening as a feminist. While working at a bakery in New Hampshire, the former high school cheerleader was “surrounded by 15 super-strong women” and realized, “I can bake and I can study literature. And I have this mind-body connection.”

Her “Rust Belt feminism,” she said, is rooted in work (and also, she notes, a pretty fair game of pool).

The essays cover everything from days of getting up early and working at the bakery to the romance of a cross-country road trip, the allure of the perfect dive bar (like Tam O’ Shanter in Lincoln), the strange phenomenon of the Pittsburgh accent (her second oldest brother has one, she doesn’t), and how important it was to Gen Xers like her not to sell out (like Nirvana when they signed to a major label).

Numerous essays detail Flick’s family history. Her roots lie in rural New York and northwestern Pennsylvania before her parents moved first to Wilkinsburg and then to Beaver Falls, where her father, a former Westinghouse employee, made a career as a life insurance salesman.

Pop culture plays a large role in the essays, from Flick’s memories of first learning what the “male gaze” meant (think of any movie you might have seen as a teenager in 1980) to the essay “All in the Family,” in which the worldview of a grumpy older South Side Slopes neighbor is softened by reruns of Norman Lear’s classic sitcom of the same name.

When she reflects on home, Flick also thinks of Pittsburgh, where she settled when real estate was still pretty cheap across the city, especially if you were willing to rip out an old shag carpet and take down a drop ceiling or two. One pursuit that has literally ingrained her in her community is vegetable gardening. (Flick teaches in both Chatham’s food studies and master of fine arts programs.)

But Pittsburgh hasn’t remained static either. For the first time as an adult, she’s lived in one place long enough to see something like a new city develop there.

“So in a way we can think of it as moving and staying in one place at the same time, right?” she said. “You see a place changing around you, and that’s kind of fun to watch.”

White Whale Bookstore is hosting a launch event for Homing on Friday, September 6th.