Sherrie Flick has long lived on the South Side Slopes, about 30 miles from where she grew up, in Beaver Falls, Pa.
But in between she logged many more miles around the country. Those travels, and how they led her back to Pittsburgh, and to a new sense of home, are the focus of her new essay collection, “Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist” (University of Nebraska Press).
Flick is an acclaimed writer of short fiction, specializing in short-short stories in collections including “Thank Your Lucky Stars” and “Whiskey, Etc.” She’s also an editor, author of the novel “Reconsidering Happiness,” a senior lecturer at Chatham University, and former co-organizer of Pittsburgh’s long-running Gist Street Reading Series.
In Beaver Falls, her adolescence coincided with the collapse of the steel industry. In the mid-1980s, she enrolled at the University of New Hampshire, and after graduation moved first to San Francisco and then to Lincoln, Neb., before relocating to Pittsburgh in the late ’90s.
She said her new book started with the question “Why am I here?” — specifically, why the South Side Slopes, in the house she’s shared with her husband for 25 years.
“You know, why am I surrounded by all these city steps?” she said. “Why have I decided to live in this extremely obscure and hard-to-get-to space?”
Practiced as she was in leaving places, she realized she hadn’t really written about Western Pennsylvania, the one where she’d chosen to remain.
“And so I sort of, you know, overtly said, ‘I'm going to write about this place. And to start off, 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 kind of memoir in stand-alone essays, “Homing” covers a lot of ground, including Flick’s awakening as a feminist. 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 mixing of the mind and the body.”
Her “Rust Belt feminism,” she said, is grounded in labor (and also, she notes, in playing a pretty fair game of pool).
The essays address everything from those early-rising days in the bakery to the romance of a cross-country road trip, the allure of the perfect dive bar (i.e., Lincoln’s Tam O’ Shanter), the curious phenomenon of the Pittsburgh accent (her second-oldest older brother has one, she doesn’t), and how important it once was to Gen Xers like her to shun selling out (like Nirvana did when it signed to a major label).
A number of essays detail Flick’s family history, which had roots in rural New York and northwest Pennsylvania before her parents relocated first to Wilkinsburg and then Beaver Falls, where her father, a former Westinghouse employee, made a career selling life insurance.
Pop culture plays a big role in the essays, from Flick’s recollection of first learning what “the male gaze” meant — think: every movie you might have watched as a teenager in 1980 — to the essay “All in the Family,” in which a grumpy elderly South Side Slopes neighbor’s worldview is softened by reruns of Norman Lear’s classic sitcom of the same name.
In contemplating home, Flick also ponders Pittsburgh, where she settled back when real estate was still pretty cheap citywide, especially if you were willing to tear up some old shag carpeting and deconstruct a drop ceiling or two. One practice that literally rooted her to her community is vegetable gardening. (Flick teaches in both Chatham’s food-studies and its master-of-fine-arts programs.)
But neither has Pittsburgh remained static. For the first time as an adult, she’s lived somewhere long enough to watch it become something like a new city.
“So in some ways, I guess we could think of it as kind of moving while staying in place, right?” she said. “You see a place change around you, and that's kind of fun to see.”
White Whale Bookstore hosts a launch event for “Homing” on Fri., Sept. 6.
