
2019-10-11 01225-tod-020433 Fungus
Apple iPhone XS Max – ƒ/1.8 1/30 4.25mm ISO640 – Devil’s Lake State Park, WI

2019-10-11 01225-tod-020433 Fungus
Apple iPhone XS Max – ƒ/1.8 1/30 4.25mm ISO640 – Devil’s Lake State Park, WI

2020-10-11 01591-tod-040399 Cattail
Canon PowerShot – ƒ/3.2 1/500 4.5mm ISO160 – Savanna Portage State Park, MN
How important is home to you? And what does home mean to you? Is it a place? Is it where you were born? Or where you grew up? I grew up moving every four months to two years. As a writer, it gave me lots to contemplate and lots to write about. (Click here to read about my novels here.)
By the time I was 15 I had attended eleven schools, lived in 18 apartments, 11 schools, 13 cities, spread out over 2 countries. So for me, home is people more than place. By that, I don’t have a lot of sentimentality about “family“ defined by genetics, because that’s not where I’ve found the most acceptance. For me, genuine family are the people to whom I can reveal anything, yet they’ll still root for me -– and in the same way, I’ll do that for them!
The actual town I live in, Lakewood, California, is so wonderful that I’ve come to regard it as home as well! Years ago, when I lived in nearby cities, I actually felt sorry for coworkers who lived here! At the time, it was known for being conservative and homogenous. Fortunately, it’s evolved into a wonderful example of diversity and open-mindedness. On my block alone, I have kind neighbors from all walks of life, all parts of the world, and all beliefs. Like the rest of the country, Lakewood has plenty of room for improvement, but we’ve I’m so very proud of the strides we’ve made over recent decades.
Our local TV channel, which covers local city council meetings and the rest of what’s going on locally, recently celebrated a 40 years! They invited residents to videotape brief messages, so here’s mine…
Today’s guest blog post is by Sherrie Flick, who lives in Pittsburgh. She’s authored a novel, two short story collections, and the new essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist. Her third story collection is due out in April 2025. Click here for more about her and her writing here.
Here she shares about how where she grew up, Western Pennsylvania, helped shape who she is today. She returned to after a decade away. As a writer, she says she always had trouble seeing the region, so she tackled it within her latest essay collection. Her experiences there, she says, made her into “a creative coming-of-age of a mill-town feminist. I ultimately came to understand that the region helped form my ideas of self and also my particular feminism…

Why am I here? This is the question behind my recent collection of essays Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist. Here, being Pittsburgh. Here, being Western Pennsylvania, a region I grew up in and then left, planning to stay gone forever. But that isn’t how it worked out—like a homing pigeon out on a run I took a long loop from east coast to west coast to Great Plains and back. How? Why? I asked myself, eventually. And then I started writing about it.

I grew up in a dying and then dead mill town: Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. I think part of my inability to see it geographically had to do with its death. The town disappeared before my eyes. A thriving city center and then a closed down one and me as a high school kid at the center of the change, thinking about new horizons.
I became a writer—publishing story collections and a novel. I became a feminist influenced by the labor and grit of my hometown combined with the theory I learned at universities. I didn’t write about my homeland or my origin story. I didn’t use its setting in my fiction, or really think about it all that much. For decades. Even after I’d returned.
And then I decided to think about it deliberately, observing all of the hows and whys of the region starting with the hilly, hard-to-maneuver-around neighborhood I had settled in: The South Side Slopes. It’s a steep place—high above everything, crisscrossed with tilted and heaving city steps, populated with little houses where the workers used to live back when the mills ran 24/7. We nestled in. I planted a garden, not thinking about why.
Then I started walking the steps—winded and huffing at their tops where there were luscious and weird views of Pittsburgh and its three rivers. I thought about the steps and in thinking and hiking them, a moment came when my eyes opened, when I could see a kind of distinct beauty I’d become immune to earlier in my life. I wrote place-based essays one observation at a time, recreating the geography and the blips and sputters that one can pull from the negative space in a life. This is how I came to be reacquainted with my homeland—by walking it and replicating it and its people on the page, trying to figure out the hows and whys of staying in one place instead of moving on, what it meant to be rooted.
Many people think this region of Pennsylvania is beautiful. The mills are gone. The sky is blue. And the rocky, hilly, tree-filled geography is inviting. I can see it now. Sort of.
“As I walk the Mission Street steps they’re straight and lean. From the bottom to the top it looks like Bubby, my Yorkie, and I will climb right into the clouds. In fact, in historic photos many city step landings look like diving boards out into a vast, awaiting city.
…It used to bustle up here. Tiny houses packed with big families, workers on three different shifts clomping up and down these steps.
In a black-and-white photograph from 1930 that I find in the University of Pittsburgh digital archives, a tall corner store rises at the base of the steps where I’m standing right now. Every Day Milk, Mother’s Quick Oats, and Heinz pickles are displayed through its plate glass window, which boasts Salada Tea in simple arched lettering. A metal sign tacked onto its wooden clapboard front poetically declares: Eat / Denver / Sandwich / Candy 5 Cents.
Now it’s nothing. Air.”
– excerpt from “Finding Home,” Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, University of Nebraska Press, 2024.
Source: Does Home Matter to You? + Learning to See Place by Sherrie Flick – Happiness Between Tails by da-AL

2022-10-11 02321-tod-036453 Sandhill Crane
NIKON D7500 – ƒ/8 1/500 600mm ISO160 – Crex Meadows Wildlife Refuge, WI
Source: Sharpshot Nature .Com 02321-tod-036453 Sandhill Crane

2023-10-11 02686-tod-037584 Sandhill Crane
NIKON D7500 – ƒ/7.1 1/500 600mm ISO200 – Crex Meadows Wildlife Refuge, WI
Source: Sharpshot Nature .Com 02686-tod-037584 Sandhill Crane

2024-10-11 03052-tod-0110515 Fall Color
NIKON D7100 – ƒ/8 1/250 105mm ISO100 – Mendota Heights, MN

2023-10-10 02685-tod-051975 Tree
Canon PowerShot – ƒ/3.2 1/500 4.5mm ISO100 – Crex Meadows Wildlife Refuge, WI

2024-10-10 03051-tod-039357 Double-crested Cormorant
NIKON D7500 – ƒ/5.6 1/500 165mm ISO250 – Mendota Heights, MN
Source: Sharpshot Nature .Com 03051-tod-039357 Double-crested Cormorant

2024-10-09 03050-tod-0110508 Fall Color
NIKON D7100 – ƒ/8 1/250 105mm ISO100 – Mendota Heights, MN

2020-10-08 01588-tod-018714 Sunflower
NIKON D7100 – ƒ/7.1 1/800 105mm ISO200 – Isanti, MN
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