“Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist”

Sherrie Flick
University of Nebraska Press, $19.95

The author Sherrie Flick has been very busy lately. These last few months have seen the publication of two substantial new collections of her work. The two books are quite different in their approaches, but both largely concern themselves with interrogating how people become who they are and pinpointing the decisions and experiences that brought them to their current moment.

“Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist” is Flick’s debut essay collection. Her attention to telling details, her easy way with revealing character, and her suitability for companionship and comedic timing are all on full display; Flick examines her own upbringing, working-class culture, her wanderings through America in the 1990s, and her eventual return to Western Pennsylvania to carve out a life on the South Side Slopes.

“What I wear, how I move, I learned through the osmosis of growing up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. A booming and then not-so-booming and then finally dead steel town,” she writes in “Bank Shot.” “Whether your parents worked in the mill or not, you learned a few things: how to play pool, the lyrics to every Bruce Springsteen song, the talk-yelling banter needed to communicate with the mechanic, the ins and outs of the corner bar, and the nuance of pierogies, square-cut pizza and oversized fish sandwiches served up by church ladies.”

front view of Blank book cover white .

“I Have Not Considered Consequences: Short Stories”

Sherrie Flick
Autumn Horse Press, $19.95

Flick, a senior lecturer at Chatham University, is best known for her short stories. And I do mean short. One of the stories in “I Have Not Considered Consequences: Short Stories” is only eight sentences long. And yet the brevity of her fiction only serves to astonish the reader further when the largesse of depth and nuance is experienced in story after story no matter the length.

Much like those artists whose metier is painting portraits on grains of rice, Flick understands that the horizontal scope of art is no limitation if you choose each stroke of the brush with precision and with the understanding that each tiny detail is a world unto itself. Flick puts on a clinic in these pages. Here in full-flower is what a master storyteller can do with the short form.

Oh, and there are bears. Lots of bears.