(Note: Natalie Doris' interview with Sherrie Flick discussing the essay collection Homing is found immediately below this interview.)
Luke Rolfes: Next up in the Laurel Review Interview Series is Sherrie Flick who has a terrific new collection of short fiction out from Autumn House Press called I Have Not Considered Consequences. Thanks so much for taking some time to talk with us today, Sherrie. I loved reading and thinking about this new collection. Can you tell us about how this project came to be? How long have you been working on this new book?
Sherrie Flick: Thanks for pulling these questions together, Luke. I’m so glad you liked the book!
This story collection arose from the pandemic. I started writing a bunch of weird bear stories to procrastinate reviving and revising an essay collection that died and was reborn in those years. At first they were just one-off stories written longhand in my journal to calm my brain, but then I typed them up and put them all into a Word doc and realized they might serve as a nice throughline in a longer collection. As I put the essay collection to bed, I started writing a bunch of non-bear stories—many of them very long, page-wise, for me. (I’m almost always a flash fiction writer.) All of the stories were drafted and revised much more quickly than my usual process. So, I think the whole book came together in one way or another between 2020 and 2024. And I just had to check the math on that. I never draft and revise that quickly. Wow.
LR: I’m curious about influences for this book. Were there, for instance, certain stories, movies, novels, shows, or albums you were into during the time of the writing?
SF: I was actually reading a lot of nonfiction during this time. (See essay collection revival from question #1.) Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake by Loeb Schloss about James Joyce’s daughter, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein by Brenda Wineapple about the messed up relationship between these two iconic Steins, Mud, Blood, and Ghosts: Populism, Eugenics, and Spiritualism in the American West by Julie Carr about, well, that one sort of speaks for itself. These books were about seriously strange times and pretty eccentric people and I think they freed me up in my fiction somehow.
I also think the stories in this collection were influenced by a long-ago obsession with Kafka that popped back into my brain.
Music-wise I’m absolutely sure I was listening to Gillian Welch on repeat one way or another, and I particularly love working to the Sera Cahoone Pandora station. There was a Karen Dalton phase in there, and my Clem Snide obsession started during copy edits.
LR: You are a prose writer with a wide arsenal. You’ve written everything from micros to novels. This book is a compilation of flash and microfiction mixed with longer, more traditional-length short stories. What about that blend appealed to you when putting this collection together?
SF: My sweet spot with fiction tends to be 750 words. And a lot of stories in this book are that length. I just understand that arc and form, and it all comes together without really thinking it through too much as far as drafting goes.
The longer stories…where did they come from? I did not set out to write long stories, for sure. Like, for instance, "In Search Of," the second story in the collection, it’s 15 book pages! I was briefly obsessed with Edith Wharton around 1994, when I took a Wharton seminar my first semester of grad school. I’ve read everything she wrote and I’ve read all the biographies written about her. And so I had all this Wharton knowledge in my head—for years!—with nowhere to put it. And it suddenly started coming out into this story about this woman who takes a walk by herself because her stodgy husband doesn’t want to join her. Again, I partially blame the forced downtime of the pandemic for some of this. The draft of that story was a real shocker to me—but its structure came out in the first run through. It obviously needed to be a long story with so many characters and this surprising semi-platonic relationship playing out between the woman and an Edith Wharton scholar she meets when she stops in a local restaurant to eat alone. I don’t usually write about academia or academic things, even though I live in that world to a degree. So yeah. I’m not really answering your question, am I?
I love collections that mix flash, and micro, and regular stories. For instance, Venita Blackburn’s How to Wrestle a Girl. I like the cadence of reading through the different forms. I tend to read collections cover to cover, like a novel, and so with this collection I really enjoyed the challenged of balancing the story lengths with the bear stories with varied points of view, etc. It was a great creative project for me.
LR: And a follow up to that: What about your process is different when writing something super short versus something that gets thousands of words to breathe and explore?
SF: I should note (sorry the essay collection is going to be a background to this interview, I guess) I was revising longform nonfiction the whole time I was writing these stories. So I was very much into length at this time in my life, so it isn’t super out of the ordinary that some of the stories spilled into a similar word count to the nonfiction, I guess. I hadn’t thought about that before, how the two books influenced each other, even though they are very, very different from each other. [NOTE: The interview with Sherrie Flick discussing her essay collection Homing is found below this interview.]
With flash I feel at home and I love that I can draft a story and then reread it in one sitting—I love the compression and the containment and just that I know this kind of writing inside and out. With longer work, it is necessary for me to hurt my brain again and again trying to figure out what it’s about, how I can contain it, how to find an ending for this big mess of ideas. It’s exhausting in the same way (at least for me) that writing a novel is exhausting. I’m forced to take naps and super long walks. I have to talk with my friends about Edith Wharton and also tennis (there’s a tennis-loving husband in that story, too). I ask myself why am I writing this super long story that isn’t even about bears? Hahaha. It’s more emotionally and mentally taxing for me to write long stuff, for sure, and maybe that’s because I’m less secure in the form at its drafting stage.
LR: Do you have a sense from the start how long a piece will be?
SF: I generally assume what I’m starting to write will be about 750 words. When it goes beyond that I start to ask myself if I’m writing a novel (which I did do once before—write a novel, that is). Once it starts to get long, I have no idea when it will end. A feeling of dread overcomes me. I’m sort of out there treading water with no shore in sight. I just checked and in this collection there are 5 long stories and all the rest (around 33 stories) are either flash fiction (under 1,000 words) or micros (around 100 words). With each of those five stories I didn’t know they would be long, and I wasn’t trying to make them long.
With the flash and micros I immediately have a sense of the ending, I can see the shore. I swim with super confident strokes to get there, which isn’t to say they weren’t revised a gazillion times. They were just easier to get onto the page.
LR: Forgive me, but I always ask this question to folks who write flash and microfiction. When writing something short, do you imagine a more extended narrative, and the short piece is a slice of that? Or do you think of flash fiction as a squished story? A small story? Let me put it the way I sometimes describe it to my students: If you have a picture frame you are trying to fill with an image (flash fiction), and the frame is 2X2, does that mean that the image is a 2X2 cropping of a 10X10, a 2X2 resizing of a 10X10, or simply a 2X2 image. Is there even a difference in your mind?
SF:Ah, I like those choices! For me, it’s always a 2x2 resizing of a 10x10 image/world. The thing that makes a good piece of flash for me is the way in which compression is used. That can be white space on the page; it can be efficient use of objects or point of view; it can be a super tight narrative arc. There are a lot of ways to achieve compression, but I think it needs to be activated within the story in order for the story to have the kind of tension/resonance that’s needed in flash fiction (or micro fiction).
LR: Of course, I have to ask you about the bear. I Have Not Considered Consequences contains interludes where a bear floats in and out of our consciousness, doing a variety of things like playing the piano, offering his beating heart, or riding in a canoe. What was the bear’s first appearance in your writing? What made you keep coming back to this creature again and again?
SF: The bear first showed up in what’s now the first story in the book, 'Breaking." It’s an unlikely premise, a story with a bear holding his beating heart in his hands while wearing cute undies. The bear came to me fully formed as an idea, not really a specific bear, but instead a kind of bearness. The story itself was inspired by some artwork by Sharon Harper and between her drawings of underwear and a self-portrait on a set of sewing instructions, the bear was born. Once the idea of the bear was born I couldn’t stop writing bear stories.
Sometimes it’s a person who is mistaken for a bear and sometimes it’s a regular bear in the woods. Other times the bear works as a mid-level professional. These ideas just kept coming and at the time I didn’t necessarily think these stories had legs. I sent "Breaking" to the literary journal Booth and Robert Stapleton, the editor, was like: Oh yes, we want this. Do you have any more? Hahaha. I said, “Well, yes I do.”
LR: Let’s take a look at a couple individual stories. I was drawn to the flash fiction called “Living,” in which the narrator follows a former crush on social media named Marko. This story seems to illustrate, in my mind, the ways in which life is warped through the lens of social media. Was that a difficult thing to satirize?
SF: It was definitely really hard to get the verb tense right in that story because sometimes social media is present tense and sometimes it’s past tense, right? I struggled with that all the way through the final copy edits. It was also hard to balance what Marko was posting and then the narrator’s kind of counter post—to get that rhythm right. The satirization itself came to me in one big gulp: Marko. We all know him in one way or another.
LR: The subject of “Bobby the Bear” isn’t a real bear. Instead, you offer us a home inspector who has a proclivity for wearing a bear suit, even while on the job. I’m interested in how this story relates to the real bear who wanders in and out of these books. What made you want to offer readers this particular “bear”?
SF: Piggybacking on what I mentioned above, I never thought of the bear as a bear. He was always a kind of essence. A muse. Remember: this started during lockdown so everything was surreal and a variety of bear stories seemed almost like a normal thing to write.
I have a friend who’s a home inspector and he’s always telling these stories about things that happen on the job. One day he told me that quite often homeowners will say no one is home when, for sure, when he gets there, there is a person in the house. So I stole that idea from him.
This story came pretty late in the bear series so giving Bobby the bear suit created a big loop of closure for me.
LR: A favorite of mine is the one you mentioned—“In Search Of.” Helen forms a relationship with a literature graduate student named Derrick, bonding over their love for Edith Wharton. I’m struck by how the characters in your stories often connect but don’t quite fit together enough to satisfy each other. Is that something you often build a story around—that almost-perfect-but-not-quite connection that people make?
SF: I don’t think I purposefully build stories around that idea, but I do think that’s how the world works. It’s so hard to communicate with another human. People don’t listen. They misunderstand. They purposefully don’t understand. They check their email mid-sentence. Everyone has their own agenda in a conversation. It’s rarely one big happy collaborative effort. So yeah, I try to replicate that on the page, for sure.
LR: Another one I loved is “Lost in Time.” Trudy, the protagonist, used to sing in a rock band called The Lickers, but now she has gotten older. She owns fish, plays pinball, and is trying to make her way through the pandemic with her partner Matty. What can you tell us about the inspiration for this piece?
SF: That story started with the first two sentences, which were “given” to me by my friend Hattie Fletcher: “You know, though—that’s fish. They either die the first day or live for a decade.” She posted this in a group chat. And I said, “That’s a great opening for a story.” And she said, “Have at it.” Hattie is an editor, not a writer, and maybe because of that she is an excellent first-sentences-of-a-story generator.
So the story definitely started there and then Trudy and Mattie came out of nowhere, except that I am of Generation X and they are of Generation X, but they have sold out and I have not. Hahaha. Anyway, it was actually a really fun story to write. It took me forever to come up with a good 90’s girlband name.
LR: “Progress” involves siblings Martha and Sam and past traumas. A particularly unnerving scene occurs when a strange man fishing by the pond tells Martha “I know who you are” while she is walking her dog. Can you talk about this story and the techniques you use to reveal past trauma and anxiety?
SF: It has a little to do with the compression I talked about earlier. This is a long story, not flash, but I used some compression techniques to get at the silences and the unspoken parts of trauma. The idea that maybe a lot is going on inside a person that doesn’t make it to the outside—or if it does make it to the outside it manifests as an unexpected action or, say, someone thinking that any weirdo guy she meets is somehow friends with her brother. It’s illogical—but those are the kind of exterior actions, exterior thoughts, trauma and anxiety create.
LR: Did you have a piece that came to you quickly and easily? On the flip side, which one did you wrestle with the most?
SF: A story that came almost fully written was “Two Bears.” I also borrowed the first sentence of that story from a friend. (It’s not like I usually go around stealing sentences from people, I swear.) And Hallie is a writer, so I asked if she was sure it was okay for me to steal it from her and she said, “No problem.” So that sentence: “My brother has hit two bears in two different states with his piece-of-shit car,” is just a thing of beauty. I instantly had the narrator and Eddie his brother and their tension over their parents’ farm in my head. The narrator moves away, Eddie stays at the farm. Eddie is into reading tarot (of course) and drinks tall boys and works at Uncle Virg’s auto repair and it all comes together in a reading that Eddie does for his brother. Anyway—wow. That just slammed itself from my fingertips into my computer, fully formed.
I struggled and struggled and struggled to end the story “Luck.” The opening came pretty quickly but after Owen invites Margo over for dinner my idea was that he would never see her again, even though they lived in the same town, but I had no idea how or why. I mean, no idea. I super struggled with that, but once I figured out the why of Margo—what motivated her actions, the rest of the story came together, but again, the ending paragraph was also impossible to write.
LR: What’s next for your work? What new projects are you up to?
SF: I’m finishing up a nonfiction craft book that I’m co-writing with Ladette Randolph and Heather Lundine. That should publish in 2026 with University of Nebraska Press. It’s due to them this September.
Other than that I’m putting together a manuscript that’s a series of micros that I’m drafting on 3x4 Post-It Notes. I’ve been meaning to do this project for some time, so I’m happy I’m finally working on it.
LR: Thanks so much for your time, Sherrie! Please check out I Have Not Considered Consequences from Autumn House Press: https://www.autumnhouse.org/books/i-have-not-considered-consequences-short-stories/
SF: Thanks Luke!
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.