Natalie Doris: Homing spans decades of your life and the essays are set in multiple locations. Through each of these essays we see a different part of what makes you who you are as a woman, a feminist, a writer, a daughter of the rust belt, a Gen Xer, and an intellectual. When you decided to create the essays for this book, how did you approach revisiting yourself and your thoughts through multiple life events and stages?
Sherrie Flick: The first essays written for Homing examined my present-day life in Pittsburgh. Even though I grew up in this region I’ve always felt at a distance from it. The very first essay I wrote with the book in mind was about the many city steps that surround and lace through my neighborhood: The South Side Slopes. There are 69 sets of city steps just on the Slopes. Through that essay I tried to answer the question, Why am I here? It’s an unlikely place to live in many ways—narrow streets, steep hills, tiny houses. To do that, I realized I also needed to explore why I left the region in the first place, why I felt the need to loop across the country with stops in New England, the Bay Area, and The Great Plains, with many, many road trips in between before returning.
First and foremost I’m a fiction writer. I’m comfortable writing scenes. I think in scene. So as I started to examine my life and all of its moving parts I let myself zero in on vivid memories. I tried to get the details of those settings on the page—the emotion of the place, and some actual factual details of the time. This second step led to research and interviews and reading journals I’d written in 1991 as a 24-year-old. Whew. After drafting these scenes I would interrogate them—ask questions, which often led to new ideas, more essays, and more research.
But I started by writing the scene, not by researching an idea. It was always a specific moment in time—like the opening scene of the essay “Instincts.” I’m jogging through my childhood neighborhood with my best friend Jill Smith. We’re in middle school, and as we jog men in pickup trucks honk at us. I wanted to think about the honks in that scene and what they meant in the context of the feminism I grew up in during the sexual revolution of the 1970s. Examining that scene led me to research Title IX, Brooke Shields, and think about Christine Blasey’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The ideas of how I became a creative writer and feminist arose organically from this scene writing as I started to look at my past and how it formed my present life.
ND: Was there a particular essay in this book that you wrote which inspired you to create the collection? If so, what was the common thread that you anticipated following from essay to essay and how much did Homing as a completed work ultimately reflect your initial vision?
SF: The lead essay “Laboring Through” was an important breakthrough for the collection as a whole. It’s where I first came to the understanding that my feminism was partially formed by labor and industry (growing up in a mill town, working at a woman-owned bakery) mixed with my growing intellectualism. I always knew the years I’d spent baking were important to me, but I didn’t really understand why until I wrote this essay. That specific connection came to me as I revised it—again, interrogating my own scenes and interviewing the bakery’s owner, Penelope Brewster. Baking was so important to me because it helped me merge my two selves—rust belt woman and creative writer—and it led to my own understanding of feminism, which is more rooted in community than theory, but which is very much informed by theory. And these are the threads that connect the book in my mind.
ND: In your essay, “Laboring Through,” the women at the Ceres Bakery seemed to have a profound impact on your development as a woman and a feminist when you were in college. What are some of the ideals that you learned from them that you find yourself sharing with other women today?
SF: The women I worked with at Ceres Bakery in Portsmouth, NH changed my life. There were about 15 bakers and most were 15-20 years older than me. I was 21 years old in 1988, working my way through an undergraduate degree at University of New Hampshire. They were bakers, but also artisans, college graduates, feminists, and activists. And really, honestly, just super fun, smart people to be around. The bakery was filled with ideas and creativity, but you know, we sold muffins and bread and worked nutty hours. We drank whiskey and smoked cigarettes. We wore t-shirts and jeans.
Some of the ideals I learned were to not take yourself too seriously. To follow passions even if it meant finding people to fill two weeks of your shifts at the last minute. I learned to be an example, I think, to younger women who don’t want to take a pre-determined career path. I hope I’m an example of an independent thinker who lives her life on her own terms.
ND: In “All in the Family” the detail that stuck out to me the most was that Waldo’s father ground light bulbs into powder and fed them to his pigeons so that they would fly home faster. Unlike homing pigeons, you seem to have left your nest and created a new one nestled in between the steps of Pittsburgh. In what ways did the pigeons in that essay help you understand your own journey “home”? At which stages in your life have you felt that you returned to your roost?
SF: I think about pigeons a lot. Like, every day. There’s a big flock that still perches on Waldo’s roof. They are there right now. They eat from the bird feeders my neighbor Bert fills across the street. We all believe they are descendants of the pigeons Waldo’s dad kept and raced decades ago. As I walk the neighborhood I often see them circling, circling high above me in big beautiful loops. Their wings flash silver at a certain angle. Then they fly back to perch on the electric wires on my street. Sometimes they’re gone, just not around at all, and I wonder where they are, but I know they’ll be back. They can’t stop themselves. So yes, that compulsion to leave and to stay is in me and in the book. How do we do both of these things well? How do we make a home, find a homeland, even if sometimes they aren’t the same place?
I’m not sure I answered your question here. But the pigeons are pretty conceptual for me, philosophical, a giant daily metaphor right outside my front door.
ND: Car trips (roaming) are tied to your independence as a woman and a writer in several places throughout these essays. You mention keeping a road trip journal with a friend on at least one of your trips together. As you settle into your current home and career, in what ways to you still find yourself through roaming?
SF: Oh, I’m still a huge fan of the road trip! I no longer drop my entire life to travel the U.S. for months at a time, and I no longer sleep in rest areas, but my husband and I have managed to finagle careers that allow us to be somewhere else for a month each year—the Florida Keys, Santa Fe, and most recently Nags Head this past February. We drive, stop along the way, settle into an Airbnb that we can call home for four weeks, even if we have to do remote work, and explore a new place, usually in the off season. It’s different from a vacation in my mind. We kind of resettle into a place, meet locals, find our favorite food co-op and cocktail place. It’s still really freeing to me and continues to inspire my writing.
Every year I drive to a writing retreat in eastern PA. It’s a glorious 5-hour drive that I usually do solo to meet up with six other women to write for a week at a lake house. The beginning of the drive takes me through stop-light filled streets lined with plaza malls and then the end of the drive is on super curvy rural roads with no cell phone reception. I am in the zone on this drive. It resets me. I am so ready to write by the time I get to the lake house.
I also find a similar freeing feeling when I’m kayaking. Just cruising along under my own propulsion is the best feeling, eye-level with herons or watching a bald eagle fly from its nest. It tracts with my creative need to explore, to be “away,” even if I’m not far from home.
I grab these little blips of roaming where I can, and they’re fabulous. I’m so thrilled when I can be on the road.
ND: In “Bank Shot” you explore what it means to be a woman playing a part on a stage typically reserved for men—a pool table. As women we are typically overlooked and underestimated in such spaces. Have these experiences shaped the way that you see yourself in more formal masculine arenas such as academia? Do you find yourself conflicted about how to best hold space and navigate the double-edged sword of male validation?
SF: This is always the struggle, right? How do you balance your life so that you aren’t always angry, aren’t always fighting, but still “winning,” and by winning I mean living your best life as a woman. I feel like growing up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, a dying mill town, taught me a lot about toughness. No way around it. I can banter with the best of them—the mechanic, the used car salesperson, you name it. This gruffness, this no-holds-barred way of interacting with people, this performance of masculinity, helped me at the pool table, yes, but it also helped me at the seminar table in grad school. It helps me today around a conference table or negotiating a freelance contract. I don’t love being Beaver Falls Sherrie, but when she kicks in it’s obvious to me that I’m living in a man’s world. My friend Amy, however, just called me Gardening Sherrie, which is what I am most of the time. (I cultivate a big urban garden in my back yard, also examined in the book.) Patient and relaxed, articulate, but willing to collaborate or compromise. Plant some stuff. Watch it grow.
ND: Class and cultural identity are important themes in several of these essays. In many ways, you walk between two worlds at once. What pivotal experiences, if any, have shaped your understanding of your otherness in places where you feel you ought to fit?
SF: Oh, you know, it’s funny. I manage to be or feel like an outsider pretty often. It helps me to remember that my astrological sign is Cancer, a crab. I walk sideways into a lot of systems and situations in my life. I’m not nostalgic for the rustbelt. I feel it served a purpose. It helped create me as a specific kind of writer and feminist, and now I live over here in this other world, but it’s not an academic world (although I do teach in academia, see: Cancer). It’s a community of artists and freethinkers. That’s where I’m most comfortable—hanging out with painters and sculptors and photographers and dancers and writers and people who live gig careers, in one way or another. Living in an interdisciplinary way makes me feel more at home because these people often don’t fit right in, I guess. These people see the world as a creative place—a place where getting work done is making art. That’s where I want to be.
ND: You write in multiple genres, what’s is next for you?
SF: I have a new short story collection coming out in April 2025 with Autumn House Press. It’s called I Have Not Considered Consequences and is my third collection with them. I’m also co-authoring a nonfiction craft book with Ladette Randolph and Heather Lundine. That book is slated to publish in 2026 with University of Nebraska Press.

Bio: Sherrie Flick is the 2025 McGee Distinguished Professor in Creative Writing at Davidson College. She received a 2023 Creative Development Grant from the Heinz Endowments and a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from The Creative Nonfiction Foundation. She served as co-editor for the Norton anthology Flash Fiction America and series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018. Autumn House Press will publish her third story collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, in April 2025. Her debut essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist published with University of Nebraska Press in September 2024 as part of their American Lives series. One of the essays in Homing, “All in the Family: Waldo and His Ghosts,” was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. Her other works include, Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short Stories, Whiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories, and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel

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