This coming summer will mark the 20th anniversary of my move to Pittsburgh. When my ex-husband accepted an offer to go to medical school at the University of Pittsburgh, I remember looking at a map to see where in Pennsylvania I was moving. I also remember being surprised that Pittsburgh was in the Rust Belt and not on the East Coast — closer both geographically and culturally to West Virginia than to New York.  While my maternal grandmother was the daughter of a West Virginia coal miner who fought in the early 20th century mine wars and died of black lung, she ran away from her small “holler” at 18 and married a Navy pilot who dragged her all over the world until they eventually settled in San Diego, where I was born. While I knew this about her, she didn’t talk about her childhood much, so I was almost entirely divorced from the history and culture of the Rust Belt. Instead, I was born to two Navy brats, and my own childhood is more easily characterized by a rootlessness than by a strong sense of place.  Indeed, it wasn’t until nearly a decade into my time here — after I got divorced and remarried to someone with deep Pittsburgh roots — that I was able to see how little I understood about the place I now call home. With each passing year, I’ve become more and more interested in closing this gap, in learning what it means to be a part of Pittsburgh. After all, my partner is from here, and it’s the place my kids have grown up. I may be a stranger in a strange land, but the people closest to me are not.      For this reason, I was very excited when my friend sent me a copy of Sherrie Flick’s new collection of essays, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist. The book weaves together stories about Flick’s childhood in Beaver Falls, her intense drive to leave her hometown as a young adult — first for college in New England and then for adventures in the San Francisco Bay Area, with many stops along the way — and her eventual return to Pittsburgh (to the home she created with her husband in the South Side Slopes).  If every book begins with a central question, as Maggie Smith suggests in her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful, the one Flick asks consistently throughout hers is, what does it mean to be from Pittsburgh? This question serves as a throughline that connects all the essays. She asks again and again how the working class values and the mill culture specific to the region have shaped who she became, her feminist values, and her way of being in the world.  This was my first encounter with Flick’s work, and it was a treat. Not only is she a fantastic writer and storyteller, but her insights into Pittsburgh’s particularities could only be told by someone like her, someone who has the perspective of having returned to her hometown after a long time away. As Terry Pratchett points out in A Hat Full of Sky, “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” Flick is able to see and name that which folks who have never left take for granted.   Author Sherrie Flick prepares to play a game of pool with Jessie Sage at Dee’s Cafe on E Carson St. on Oct. 13, 2025. Credit: Mars Johnson In my eyes, this was most clearly shown in her essay “Bank Shot,” where she writes about her time as a funded PhD student in the Midwest, and the hours she spent at dive bars perfecting her pool game while avoiding the hauitness of academia. While she was not thinking about it in these terms at the time, her instinct to break up her theorizing with a cheap beer, shit talking, and working the pool table was a way of connecting with her roots. Flick writes, “It is totally not cool to take on intellectual airs where I grew up.”   While she wasn’t in Pittsburgh at this point in her life, she attributes her ability to masterfully navigate the bar and ultimately to dominate the pool table as a product of her upbringing. She says, “How to operate in a bar, how to walk up to a pool table without hesitation. What I wear, how I move, I learned through the osmosis of growing up in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.”  Though the dive bars where she played pool were male dominated spaces, she felt at home in them. She writes, “Body language and working class etiquette let my Rustbelt slip show.” She may not speak Pittsburgese (a theme she explores in the essay “Talk Right”), but Pittsburgh is right below the surface, shining through when she cocks her hip to line up a long shot.  One of the central insights of the essay is that becoming good at pool not only connected her to her working class Pittsburgh roots, but it also served as a concrete example of the feminist theory she was reading in class. She writes, “I started to call the pool table a feminist arena.” Moreover, “By year two of my graduate work it became important for me to teach all the women creative writers in my program how to play pool.”   I learned to play pool in middle and high school when my friends and I would gather at the community club house near our school on hot summer days to pass the time. While I learned the rules of the game and sometimes got lucky enough to sink balls without scratching, I wasn’t old enough to drink or go to bars, and I had yet to develop a feminist consciousness. My experience of playing pool was remarkably different from hers, and hers sounded more fun!  While I technically know how to play pool, I realized as I was reading the book that I wanted her to teach me as if I was one of her creative writing grad student colleagues. This is how I ended up at Dee’s Cafe on the South Side, talking to Flick about feminist theory, academia, Yinzer bar etiquette, feminine rage, writing, and community while we played two games of pool and drank beer.  We met in front of Dee’s, a bar I would never think to go to on my own, and walked in together and ordered a beer. Having never spent much time in bars, and particularly not working class Pittsburgh bars, I don’t intuitively know the rules (something my partner points out when I inevitably break them). Flick, on the other hand, knows what she’s doing. She writes:  Here are the rules (there really aren’t any rules): Do not order wine. Do not order a margarita that involves a blender. Do not order any kind of cocktail that would be served “up.” Do not talk loudly about academia or feminist theory or your vegan ethics. Do not flirt with the patrons unless you really, really mean to flirt. Do not expect table service. Ask politely when you ask for change for the pool table or pinball machine. If you really, truly suck at darts, do not play darts. Same for pool. This isn’t your time. Certainly in this vein, there are also rules about what sort of beer I should order, but I didn’t remember what they were. I looked at the drafts and ordered a Sam Adams Octoberfest, knowing full well that this probably wasn’t the best choice, but too embarrassed to ask her what I was supposed to order. We took our beers down to the room with the pool tables and set up. When I mentioned the list of implicit rules she wrote about, she was quick to remind me that all spaces have them: art galleries, coffee shops, classrooms, etc. Part of the beauty of Homing is its insistence that we talk about the cultural mores of Rust Belt dive bars in the same way we talk about them in any other cultural setting. “Not everyone knows how to navigate a bar,” she points out. “By that I mean not everyone is aware of and able to adjust themselves according to the setting.” Admittedly, I am not particularly good at this, which is one of the reasons I asked her to be my guide.  Jessie Sage plays a game of pool with Sherrie Flick at Dee’s Cafe on E Carson St. on Oct. 13, 2025. Credit: Mars Johnson In the book, Flick looks at her time playing pool as a grad student as distinctly feminist because she and her friends did not allow themselves to be pushed out of these male dominated spaces. Instead, they challenged and surprised them. She writes,  If you’re good at pool, which I am, you can garner some respect from the men who grip sweating bottles of beer along the bar top over there. Not cat-calling, body-objectifying respect, but instead, a nod and a “nice bank shot” respect. A kind of “I see you” respect.  Flick understands that this surprise is only possible because the men in the bar operate under the assumption that her and her friends wouldn’t be able to hold their own. She writes:  Yes, we were angry. Really, really angry about a lot of things we weren’t necessarily figuing out, but part of it had to do with the pool table and the assumption that we didn’t belong. The assumption that we sucked. That we — say it — played like girls. As I read this, I thought about my own grad school experience. While I went home at night to take care of my young children and not to the bars to play pool, I knew exactly what she was talking about. Rage fueled my own grad school experience studying philosophy, where I was reminded over and over by my male colleagues that I didn’t belong. Had I had a place to take this energy, one where I could subvert the power dynamic that felt oppressive, I may have been able to better navigate my department. Indeed, I think this is the role that games of all sorts play in our lives: they provide us with the skills necessary to handle complex dynamics in other areas of our lives. Interestingly, the pool table is where Flick was able to bring parts of her disparate worlds together. Her working class upbringing and the rage she was only beginning to make sense of.  Another throughline in the book is the importance of friendship among women, from the grad students she taught to play pool, to the older women who taught her to bake when she was in her early 20s, to her best friend whose death she mourned. These intergenerational deep friendships play a key role in her life and in her book.  We came together to play pool and talk about her book, but ended up engaging in deep discussions about life, art, and love that reminded me why it’s important to take the time, as Flick suggests, to foster relationships with smart and interesting women. And in my case, especially ones who can help me make sense of my experience here in this city that I now call home. The post Pittsburgh writers Jessie Sage and Sherrie Flick talk “Rust Belt feminism” over pool at a South Side dive bar appeared first on Pittsburgh City Paper | News, Dining, Music, Best Of, Arts, Film. ...read more read less