Inter-Review

John Gallagher (JG): I've just finished reading Homing and enjoyed it. Congratulations, Sherrie! Both of our books have Rust Belt in our titles and in our themes. As you say, quoting a professor early in your book, “I know places like this exist, but I never hear about them.” Why do you think writers like us find these Rust Belt communities so fascinating to write about? BTW, I remember those old pool tables that you fed quarters into and the chunk as the balls dropped.Sherrie Flick (SF): God, I love those pool tables. Great to e-meet you, John, and to work on this back and forth via our books. Thanks for your compliments on Homing!I've finished your collection and had such a great time reading through and learning about Detroit and also how your experience of the Rust Belt coincided with and deviated from my own.The Rust Belt is a weird place to live in, to be from—there are tropes from the nineteenth century that still stand. People still think cities like Detroit and Pittsburgh are smoky and that the rivers are lined with operating mills. I think part of the lure is that—but the cities aren't like that at all anymore! We live in places that people don't understand at all. We've lived through troubled economic times and in some ways that has made us kind of invisible on the ground and in the media. When people come to visit they often, as you noted in your book, want to see the ruin porn—the decay of industry, the heaps of rust. And there's an aesthetic allure there for sure. I wanted to write about the Rust Belt because I'm from it, and I've never come to terms with it. In my book I tried to figure out why I returned, why I've stayed, why I can't really see this region even though I'm inside of it. I was interested in wrestling with myself and the region and the people I talked to as I wrote essays that became my collection. How about you? What's the attraction? Unlike me, you were paid to observe it, boots on the ground—a fascinating vantage point.JG: When you tell out-of-towners you live “in Detroit,” they often ask, “What suburb?” They can't fathom that a writer with a job and some disposable income would choose to live in a Rust Belt city like Detroit. But I think one appeal of the Rust Belt for writers is that these cities retain a lot of their old ethnic identities in bars and restaurants—Polish, Jewish, Irish, Black—while welcoming an amazing variety of the new and different. This blend of old and new, of Rust Belt memories and tech-centered future, of Greatest Generation and Gen Z, could be unique to places like Detroit and Pittsburgh. As a writer, I at least find the urban scene here fascinating.And I suppose another benefit for writers is that our field isn't as overcrowded in these cities as you may find in places like New York or Los Angeles. If you find your voice here as a writer, there's a good chance you'll get a hearing.SF: Pittsburgh has been the darling of renewal for a bunch of years—I think the many universities here, along with its many neighborhoods and many foundations, kept it afloat. I do think people move here for some of that old-school charm that you mention, for the until-recently cheap housing market, and for the cultural arts scene. One thing we've said since we moved here: The thing about Pittsburgh is that it needs another of whatever you're thinking of starting. Still true. Pittsburgh is a place where you can start things.One thing I noted when reading through your book was our similar experiences, although at different times in our careers. You wrote about the rise of the Detroit suburb and your experience of that as a journalist in the early 1990s, while I visited Detroit (and its suburbs) with my friend Nancy Jones at that same time. Possibly my first-ever visit to Detroit? I would have been around 22. She grew up there and toured me around downtown, which looked very much like a war zone. I remember the shock of it. We ate in the Greek section of town, at a restaurant where there was dancing (and great food), but that part of town had been kind of walled off with indoor walkways and such to shield it from what was happening out there? Does that ring a bell?After we toured the downtown, she took me out to the suburbs to meet some friends and it was like visiting Nirvana. Such a completely stark contrast from the city. I couldn't believe it. Clearly a lot of money and nice houses and some cool shops and restaurants. I had never once before that moment considered that suburbs could be cool. Hahaha. I stumbled into the changes you investigated, so in reading your chapter I was sent right back to that trip with my friend in my early adulthood, living what you articulated.In another synchronous moment, a few years ago I had a reading at The Good Tyme Writers Buffet in Hamtramck. It was held at the Public Pool art space in October 2018. Cool space and a great, vibrant reading/performance series run by the writer Steve Hughes. My husband and I decided to spend the weekend in the city and we rented an Airbnb at Food Field, an urban farm just a few blocks away. It was awesome. There were fresh eggs from the chickens and we got to walk around the farm in the morning. I think there were emus? While you were writing about the rise of urban farming in Detroit, I was benefiting from the dream of it.I wondered if you had any similar experiences while reading my book? A kind of mind-melding time travel to the same subject but at a much different time in your life?JG: Yes, I remember those Greektown restaurants you mention and the failed concept back in the 1980s of the downtown festival marketplace, designed as a sort of fortress where YOU WILL BE ENTERTAINED!! All gone now, replaced by a more genuine street life with small shops, lots of local entrepreneurs, many in the food or farming field like the one you saw in Hamtramck. I think perhaps both Pittsburgh and Detroit went through a period of false rejuvenation, so to speak, when a lot of showcase projects got built, like the Renaissance Center in Detroit, that didn't help at all. But now that both cities are attracting a lot of talented young people, and a lot of the local or long-time artists and entrepreneurs are finally getting their due, a more real city starts to emerge.The part of Homing that most reminded me of Detroit was paradoxically when you talk about the hills and the staircases that define your neighborhood. We don't, of course, have hills in Detroit, but it's that genuine sense of place that struck me about your book. There's a real city there, as there is here, and it emerges in details like landscape and the old architecture that survives. Down in far southwest Detroit, there's an old social club known as the Carbon Club. There used to be a lot of steelworkers in the vicinity, and the walls are filled with images of the club's sponsored baseball club from like 1920 when Polish was spoken in the neighborhood, and everyone worked with their hands. Those places may be forgotten by most people today but they remain in Detroit's DNA. That's what your book awoke in me, that deep sense of place and people.SF: So how did we come to write these books? Do you want to talk a little bit about your writing process and how the book came to be? I'll start.In 2015, I was encouraged to apply for a Writing Pittsburgh Fellowship from the Creative Nonfiction Foundation. Through this fellowship I wrote a long-form creative nonfiction piece about the many city steps in my neighborhood (69 sets!) and looked at the unlikely nature of the South Side Slopes, where I live in Pittsburgh, perched above the city, where the steel workers once lived and walked down the slope to the mills, and—of course—back up.Writing that researched essay led me to a book proposal about old and new Pittsburgh and a book contract that was then killed in the first months of the pandemic. I had 90,000 words lying around and nothing to do, so I started pulling out the sections that most interested me and converting them into essays that were more about me than the city itself. I circled into the idea of Rust Belt feminist and my always iffy relationship to Western Pennsylvania's geography. It was a kind of Frankenstein situation, where I stitched new ideas into drafted text, and soon I could see a much leaner (45k) manuscript forming, a kind of memoir-in-essays about my creative and feminist development as impacted by the mill town I grew up in and Western Pennsylvania culture in general.My background is fiction. I consider myself a fiction writer. I've written nonfiction articles and freelance pieces for money, but I hadn't considered myself a creative nonfiction writer really until I learned a lot from my fellowship. I found myself reaching back to my academic research skills and then reforming fictional craft elements to meet my needs in these essays. It's kind of funny that my fiction tends to be short, flash and microfiction, but all of my essays are very long.After I had the manuscript pulled together it really seemed like a university press book to me. I've always admired University of Nebraska Press's American Lives series, so I queried that press and a couple others, and soon the manuscript went through peer review at UNP and I was offered a contract.JG: Well, when I retired from full-time daily journalism at the Detroit Free Press in December 2019, I had no thought of writing a memoir. After all, I thought, journalists are observers, not participants—that is, we're not cops, firefighters, surgeons, politicians, etc. I thought there wouldn't be much to write about in a memoir. But just a few short months after I retired, we all went into the first COVID lockdown, and with little to do outside by way of a normal life, I just went to my computer every morning and noodled around some anecdotes from my career, starting with the one that opens Rust Belt Reporter. In fact, I believe the first sentence I wrote that first morning is the one that still opens the book. Anyway, it all flowed from there, and within two months I had most of the manuscript written, although it took another year of fiddling with it to get it into the final form.In hindsight, my thought that a journalist wouldn't have much to say in a memoir was backward. We have such amazing access to all sorts of interesting people and events that we can offer unique takes on our busy world. That's what I found while working on my book.And one final thought about the writing process: Some might think it difficult to switch from writing about, say, urban policy in Detroit to writing about oneself, but in fact for me it was just another writing assignment. It's always most difficult to come up with the initial idea, the spark of inspiration, after which it's all about putting words on the page and making them sing. I didn't find writing about myself any more challenging that writing about anything else; it was actually sort of cathartic. But of course it still takes endless pains to get the manuscript, each page, paragraph, sentence, word, the best we can make it.