To be a gardener is to be a problem solver. Just ask the 185.9 million Americans who do so. From researching university websites for best practices on how to tame flea beetles and leaf miners, to chatting up neighbors on ways to keep deer and groundhogs at bay, to amending soil that contains too much clay, there’s always something to solve.
These challenges, though, get balanced by the promise of fresh air, sunshine, and meditative properties that come with working wrist-deep in the dirt, the thrill of spotting the first green tomato of the year on the vine, or sharing a bumper-crop of the tastiest lettuce ever grown.
Being a gardener means to love fresh food. It also means joining a subculture that connects through a shared appreciation of those triumphs and struggles, so much so, that one might chug his bike up one of the steepest streets in Pittsburgh after inviting himself, in a less intrusive way than a stray vine in a patch of prickly pears, to check out a local writer’s garden just to see their set-up and talk shop for a bit.
Though the garden is, in her words, “a bit of a wreck from my year away,” having been selected as the recent McGee Distinguished Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Davidson College, Sherrie Flick’s backyard on the South Side Slopes has its own kind of celebrity. The space has been the focus of her essays as well as a gardening column in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette while adorning the cover of her well-received essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, in the form of a painting by landscape artist Jarid del Deo. Flick sees gardening as “interdisciplinary,” with her creative writing process “informed more by the different ways humans access creativity than by academic literature.” She goes on to emphasize that her “interest in food and food systems and how we grow and make food existed and overlapped with the artists” she’s kept company with “since I was an undergraduate.” That she sees “gardening and cooking as creative acts—all kinds of processes and improvisations and experimentation going on there.” The same can be said for both her first dive into essay-as-memoir with Homing, as well as her fiction, including the most recent story collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, as food, drink and the act of creating it remain foundational for Flick.
One entry point into understanding the act of growing vegetables, and by turns, interacting with other species, comes in her essay “Caretaker, Murderer, Undertaker,” which leans on a lighter tone than the title suggests, while still considering the existential relationships the urban gardener has with the natural world. “We work toward death. On the way to harvest we drown bugs and chase groundhogs. We throw rocks. We actually throw rocks. We make elaborate deer reflectors with Irish Spring soap and tin pie pans and human hair…I remember the first time I actually wanted to strangle a deer with my bare hands. It had daintily consumed all of my hard-to-grow, heartbreakingly beautiful, light yellow, heart-shaped heirloom tomatoes right off the vine, leaving just the vine—vibrant green and inedible. No tomatoes. Even a baby deer. I would have strangled it.”
The connection to the iconic nightshade runs deep for Flick. When asked about her first job, she recalls a time before sixth grade “selling tomatoes with Donny Hudak, roadside in Patterson Township where I grew up…he would sell the produce in a gravel lot in front of a short section of businesses…and I think my desire to one day own a little vegetable stand came from that and maybe it’s why I have a giant garden now?” Though she characterizes the memory as “elusive,” it’s often these moments, well-explored in Flick’s nonfiction, that leave their imprint in ways that can’t be recognized until later, with reflection acting as a mirror held up to a life lived. She goes on to explain that “essays are my roots [explaining] how the rustbelt impacted my feminism and creativity.”
Those roots get well-explored throughout Homing, but most importantly so in another essay of hers, “Laboring Through.” In it, Flick weaves her move to study as an undergrad at the University of New Hampshire with a contrasting Western PA steel-town upbringing. It’s also a time when Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” becomes anthemic, dovetailing with the decline of industry that brought Beaver County unemployment to a “staggering” 28% by 1983 according to a study the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Social and Urban Research. The contrasts of those two places— “it seems like time travel, moving from Western Pennsylvania to New England. I’m moving from the past to the future. A geographic magic trick ”— will come to make all the difference in Flick’s worldview and furthers the intersectionality that occurs at so many points along food’s ecosystem, including feminism.
It’s at the woman-owned Ceres Bakery in Portsmouth, NH, whose motto, “Eat something, you’ll feel better,” feels like advice worth taking. In Penny Brewster’s vision of “a place that was safe for women to work because it wasn’t necessarily safe in a lot of restaurants,” Flick will trade the still-stereotyped Pittsburgh image of labor as “macho” in a “hard-working, blue-collar, beer-drinking city” for a baker’s pride that comes “with this connection to labor, the physical power of my body, that lets me into this new alien world while remaining tethered to the old one.”
While the Pittsburgh-region’s loss of labor jobs “pushes the white high school boys to double down on their domination of both women and people of color,” Flick learns from Penny something more important: “There’s an education in freedom here. The idea of fun in work. The people that flourish are people right on the verge of figuring out who they are. When they learn that a workplace can have this environment, it’s an eye opener.”
The lessons learned at Ceres Bakery continue to follow Flick and not only include “how to knit, how to pack for a four-day hike, and the value of whole milk and full-fat butter,” but also “important things about being a woman, a feminist, a writer, and an expatriate industrial town survivor.” Though a need for growth as a writer will cause her to leave it behind a few years later for a move to San Francisco, she calls the bakery “my home and the people who worked there with me are my family.”
Flick’s identity as a baker will follow her throughout visits to all of 48 states of the contiguous US. It will also follow her into the pages of her fiction where more than one protagonist is immersed in work she returns to “once or twice a year, and a few years ago I worked a shift with my favorite pie baker Lyn,” who she describes in Homing with “muscular arms pushing around the giant rolling pin like it’s a twig.” When she returns for a guest appearance, it leaves her sore but grateful for “that night we roll pie crusts, pinch tart crusts, and cut a gazillion top crust stars and laugh and gossip as if I’ve never left the place.”
Creative nonfiction is meant to be both informative and immersive, tapping into unique experiences and shared by unique voices. In a 2014 essay penned for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Flick travels to the Arkansas Ozarks for a writing retreat but uses bread baking and whiskey tasting to make connections with locals who turn out to have their own links to Pittsburgh. The trip also gives her time to read, making her 14-day stay “connected to the idea of waiting and writing about it all that takes me through.” Her choice of reading? Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin’s The Physiology of Taste: Or Meditations on the Transcendental Gastronomy, first published in 1825. Brillat-Savarin is known as the founder of the gastronomic essay, but it’s the quote Flick pulls from his text on epicureanism that resonates when he says that good eating “concerns also every state of society for just as it directs the banquets of assembled kings, it dictates the number of minutes needed to make a perfectly boiled egg.” It’s a statement that reminds me of learning that the early roots of WWII were planted with the Japanese invasion of Korea for rice production, while later finding myself immersed in an article in The Atlantic about the invention of the rice cooker. Clearly, the tendrils of food reach in every direction.
That reach includes literature. Consider how the rituals and connections of sharing a meal or drink add to the humanity of characters written for the page: there’s the Bible and The Epic of Gilgamesh, Moby Dick and The Sun Also Rises, James Joyce and Haruki Murakami, Lee Young Li and The Beats. The list can be endless because the best writing lingers viscerally and sensually, emphasizing experience over the theoretical. It also helps if the setting is active, not passive. When asked about this, Flick shares that early on, her writing was more interested in “rooms, not places.”
This changed with the drafting of her novel, Reconsidering Happiness, whereby “place became more and more important to the characters and the story. I started thinking about setting more overtly and trying to understand its craft. Soon, it was clear that character could be buoyed by setting and so could dialogue. Setting is often the map that traces plot. I became interested in Chekhov’s theories of writing, which have to do with replicating what a writer sees/knows of the world onto the page without judgment. Easier said than done. And I guess that practice—of trying to be baffled by the world—has carried me through the past two decades of my career. Now I think setting is the singular most important craft element in fiction and I think coming to understand that led me to nonfiction, in a way. It gave me an impulse to want to understand the worlds I have lived in, live in. It made me want to try and figure out Pittsburgh, Western Pennsylvania, the culture here, the geography, my role in it.”
The stories in her recent fiction collection, I Have Not Considered Consequences, come both bite-sized (she’s Senior Editor for the flash narrative journal SmokeLong Quarterly) and longer, with several stories told from the perspective of a bear. When asked how Homing and Consequences came about so close together, Flick shares, “I was pulling together the essays that comprise Homing from a much larger, recently defunct manuscript—doing the finesse-y, exacting, slow work of manuscript building and revision. I love revision, but it’s so different from the freedom of drafting with no goal in mind, and so I started writing these bear stories in my journal, kind of out of the blue, to procrastinate, as a sort of release. It was Covid lockdown, so my days consisted of nebulous spans of time where weird things could organically happen. But I often balance one project off of another, that part wasn’t too new. By the time I’d drafted 13 bear stories I started to wonder if they could be the start of a manuscript. I was pretty skeptical, but I typed them up and thought maybe they could work as a thread through a larger collection. I don’t generally think about structure so early with a manuscript, but for I Have Not Considered Consequences it came first, and then I wrote a bunch of non-bear stories that circled around them. It seems kind of nuts now that I think back on it. I wrote some very long stories bouncing off of some very short bear micros.”
Those “bear” stories will keep readers off balance as they lean on quirk, imagination, and a bit of surrealism, befitting those strange pandemic days that can feel so long ago. Flick places the bear in the woods, playing piano, “waiting for the next pickup basketball game”, a manager with a third floor office where he ruminates on coffee, and even in the form of Bobby, a home inspector. It’s Bobby who, after suiting up as a bear to do his work, sees himself “standing in his bathroom waving back at his bear self, turning to see his little bump of a tail, swiveling his paws this way and that. Bobby gave a little jump. The bottles on the dresser behind him wobbled.” The ending of “Bobby the Bear” is a keeper, and there’s a sense of freedom and possibility that these “bear” stories allow.
A favorite, “Into the Night,” further grounds Flick’s writing in the alimentary, with the unnamed bartender protagonist, tabbed as “beartender” by an annoying bar regular. Flick writes, “He’d been bartending at The Fig for six months. The social nature of the gig suited him. Like not-working, but with a to-do list. Particularly, he enjoyed plunging the dirty glasses into three tubs to get them clean. He liked setting them neatly in formation like bowling pins on the drying rubber mat. He chatted while he worked. Fluid, easy.” As a former bartender and service industry veteran, I feel Flick gets the details right. The “bear” often feels like a free-flowing id that allows Flick to toe the line between human social norms and apex predators who don’t do etiquette. The bear doesn’t “slash Ted’s chest to shreds” but instead turns the tables by referring to the regular, Ted, as “Teddy Bear” which Ted “in turn did not appreciate. ‘C’mon dude,’ Ted said, dabbing at his forehead with the handkerchief. ‘Stop acting like you’re coming on to me. It’s creeping me out. You’re a bear.” It’s also the dream of many bartenders to tell those irritating regulars how they really feel, though the bear’s approach to consistency is questionable: “Concoctions he threw together so fast in the shaker that his own brain didn’t have time to register the ingredients and he could never replicate them…Who’s going to second-guess a bear at happy hour?”
When asked to clarify how these stories took shape, Flick answers, “The bear was my pandemic muse, stepping onto the pages of my journal without prelude. The bear and his bearness just popped into my subconscious and led me through a set number of stories and then stepped away. It’s like I was completely subsumed by the bear, just kind of breathed it in and out for months and then it was gone. A cycle, it felt like. So during those super weird pandemic lockdown months the bear kept me company or an idea of a bear did. I don’t feel like the bear in my stories is one bear but instead the idea of a bear that helped me explore…explore what? Parts of myself? I’m not sure. I felt not in control of these stories and their purpose, but at the same time they felt important to write—to let loose in this way that was an experimental free fall.”
Yet while there’s a sense of “anything can happen” in Flick’s “bear” stories, in the others there’s also a sense of manners and comportment to be followed (or not followed) by the characters, sometimes at a restaurant or dinner party, where the sense of decorum covers up something more interesting that runs just beneath it. “In Search Of,” follows her protagonist Helen, married to Josh, and is “patient to a fault, her friends said.” Wanting more than the “monotonous” life she sometimes has with her husband, she instead “leaned forward, and that leaning got her standing. Soon she had shoes on and a light coat and without a word she opened and closed the front door—the door they never used except for company—and took off on foot into town.”
Helen finds herself dining alone in a new restaurant where she allows her waiter, Derrick, a grad student, reading “Edith Wharton for semesters,” to order for her. The story leans into food—pureed carrots and shishito peppers, salmon with wild rice, turkey with oyster stuffing, orange pound cake with chocolate glaze—but also a sense of the unknown, as the dynamic between the characters plays out in unexpected ways during a Wharton-themed dinner party. It also allowed Flick to flex her research muscle so she could “funnel all my Wharton knowledge into a short story.”
Of writing two books released relatively close together, Flick adds, “I think together they show two sides of me…The essay collection is straightforward (for me) and the story collection is experimental. I feel like both books circle around the truth in very different ways. The essays rely on memory, research, and interviews. A kind of factual truth that’s still very hard to get right, and the story collection relies on getting a more emotional truth correct.” When pressed for writerly advice, she points to Tim O’ Brien who told her workshop at Sewanee Writer’s Conference: Remember to have your characters look around.
So before I take leave of Flick’s garden for the ride downhill, I scan the top-notch view of the city from a vantage point I’ve never had, watching commuters head for home on the Parkway. It also reminds me of that one creative writing axiom: all characters are a desire. In which case, I begin to wonder about all of the stories playing out in front of me, ones that’ll begin with that age old question: What should we eat for dinner?
