Book Birthdays, Nebraska

Happy Book Birthday to Homing

Book Birthdays celebrate one year of a book’s life in social media posts, reviews, and more. This month we’re saying Happy First Book Birthday to Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist (Nebraska, 2024) by Sherrie Flick.

About the Book:

Homing traces the creative coming of age of a mill-town feminist. Sherrie Flick, whose childhood spanned the 1970s rise and 1980s collapse of the steel industry, returned to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, witnessing the region’s before and its after.

With essays braiding, unbraiding, and then tangling the story of the author’s father with Andy Warhol, faith, dialect, labor, whiskey, Pittsburgh’s South Side Slopes neighborhood, grief, gardening, the author’s compulsion to travel, and her reluctance to return home, Flick examines how place shaped her experiences of sexism and feminism. She also looks at the changing food and art cultures and the unique geography that has historically kept this weird hilly place isolated from trendy change.

A Word From the Author:

I’m the quiet one on our street. My husband Rick talks to all the neighbors and delivers my cookies and garden produce door-to-door. I smile, wave, say hello. Perhaps I used to be sort of a mystery.

Because of this and for many other reasons, I wasn’t sure how my neighbors would respond to my essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, which was, in part, about our neighborhood, the South Side Slopes of Pittsburgh. My plan was to not let anyone know about the book. Rick, of course, started handing out copies.

Bert (Alberta) was the first to finish Homing. She loved the book. Loved it. She told anyone who walked by or visited her porch that it was about our neighborhood and how I lived right there (beside her). She hand-sold a lot of books for me.

You never know how a book will be received, especially a book about creativity and feminism on a solidly working-class street. I wrote the essays in Homing as a way to come to terms with the region I grew up in and reluctantly returned to—a region whose geography I couldn’t seem to see. We wedged ourselves into the most unlikely place at the tiptop of it all. Here, I’ve found my people, who seem to love me and my book for who we are.   

Bert often yells, “We’re so proud of you,” as I head out to a reading or event. ‘We’ being the street, the people here—and Bert herself.

Reviews:

“Perhaps, this is one of the many goals of personal essay and memoir: to reveal and inspire an audience to look closely at the who, what and where of their lives and the writer’s.” —Fred Shaw, Pittsburgh Quarterly

“These nuanced essays are a celebration of the community Flick has formed as an adult and of Pittsburgh itself.”—Nancy McCabe, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Homing is a book as generous and tender as it is fierce and funny.” — Sarah Viren, author of To Name the Bigger Lie: A Memoir in Two Stories

“[Flick’s] story is one ‘of learning to stand to run to leave to find home to leave again and again, only to return to where I started, changed.’”—Sonia Nicholson, Rivanna Review

“Her attention to telling details, her easy way with revealing character, and her suitability for companionship and comedic timing are all on full display.”—Kristofer Collins, Pittsburgh Magazine

“At times elegiac, at times sassy, frequently funny, and always well written. Flick’s essays transport us to the places where she finds her homes . . . and invites us to think about the homes we’ve left and lost and found and loved.”—Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs

“Brilliant and analytical, grieving and powerful, these essays move with her soaring spirit. Read them!”—Hilda Raz, author of Letter from a Place I’ve Never Been: New and Collected Poems, 1986–2020

Interviews:

90.5 WESA

Brevity

JWMM

Laurel Review

Listen and Be Heard

Memoir Land

Chatham Pulse

Rivers of Steel

On Social Media:

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