If every book begins with a central question, as Maggie Smith suggests in her memoir You Could Make This Place Beautiful<\/a>, 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n This was my first encounter with Flick\u2019s work, and it was a treat. Not only is she a fantastic writer and storyteller, but her insights into Pittsburgh\u2019s 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<\/a>, \u201cComing back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.\u201d Flick is able to see and name that which folks who have never left take for granted.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n In my eyes, this was most clearly shown in her essay \u201cBank Shot,\u201d 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, \u201cIt is totally not cool to take on intellectual airs where I grew up.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n While she wasn\u2019t 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, \u201cHow 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Though the dive bars where she played pool were male dominated spaces, she felt at home in them. She writes, \u201cBody language and working class etiquette let my Rustbelt slip show.\u201d She may not speak Pittsburgese (a theme she explores in the essay \u201cTalk Right\u201d), but Pittsburgh is right below the surface, shining through when she cocks her hip to line up a long shot.\u00a0<\/p>\n 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, \u201cI started to call the pool table a feminist arena.\u201d Moreover, \u201cBy 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.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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!\u00a0<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/101425_SherrieFlick-2-1.jpg\")
Author Sherrie Flick prepares to play a game of pool with Jessie Sage at Dee\u2019s Cafe on E Carson St. on Oct. 13, 2025. Credit: Mars Johnson<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/101425_SherrieFlick-3-1.jpg\")
Jessie Sage plays a game of pool with Sherrie Flick at Dee\u2019s Cafe on E Carson St. on Oct. 13, 2025. Credit: Mars Johnson<\/p>\n