Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist

Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist 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.

Carefully researched, deeply personal, and politically grounded in place and identity, Homing is an explicitly feminist and anti-nostalgic intervention in writing about the Rustbelt.

Sherrie Flick is a senior lecturer in the MFA and food studies programs at Chatham University and a freelance writer and editor. She received a Writing Pittsburgh fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation and one of the essays in Homing, ＂All in the Family: Waldo and His Ghosts,＂ was listed as notable in The Best American Essays 2023. Flick is the author of Thank Your Lucky Stars: Short Stories, Whiskey, Etc.: Short (Short) Stories, and Reconsidering Happiness: A Novel (Nebraska, 2009). She writes, works, and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.