Sherrie Flick

New flash fiction collection by Sherrie Flick, coeditor of Flash Fiction America and author of Thank Your Lucky Stars and Whiskey, Etc., a Foreword INDIES bronze prize for best story collection.I Have Not Considered Consequences delves into the complexities of grief, desire, and a peculiar intersection between humans and bears. Flick’s evocative and thought-provoking stories follow characters like Bobby, a local home inspector who zips into a bear suit on his daily rounds, and a Gen-X couple, Matty and Trudy, navigating the ups and downs of their adult lives, from a dead fish named Patti Smith to dashed dreams of indie rock stardom. Women wander through small-town streets as they ponder love, allegiance, and Edith Wharton.In Flick’s world, bears don’t just roam the wild—they play basketball, dance, and even work as midlevel business professionals. Through this memorable cast of characters, Flick reveals intriguing secrets about humanity and yearning with her signature blend of stark honesty and humor.

Shortlisted for the 2025 Book of the Year Award from Writers Conference of Northern AppalachiaHoming: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist traces the creative coming of age of a mill-town feminist. Sherrie Flick, whose childhood spanned the 1970s rise and 1980s collapse of the steel industry, returned to Pittsburgh in the late 1990s, witnessing the region’s before and its after. With essays braiding, unbraiding, and then tangling the story of the author’s father with Andy Warhol, faith, dialect, labor, whiskey, Pittsburgh’s South Side Slopes neighborhood, grief, gardening, the author’s compulsion to travel, and her reluctance to return home, Flick examines how place shaped her experiences of sexism and feminism. She also looks at the changing food and art cultures and the unique geography that has historically kept this weird hilly place isolated from trendy change. Carefully researched, deeply personal, and politically grounded in place and identity, Homing is an explicitly feminist and anti-nostalgic intervention in writing about the Rustbelt.

Full of wit and humor, readers will find themselves immersed in big worlds contained in short narratives. From a woman who gets more than what she bargained for to a cowboy down on his luck, these complex stories serve up love and loss, longing and heartbreak, and cruelty and tenderness in poetic images and the most satisfying of moments.

These stories are funny and serious, outrageous and completely familiar. Readers will meet a cast of characters ranging from a woman who cleans her soon-to-be ex-husband’s house to a woman who seduces her paper boy. These stories are short, but leave readers completely satisfied and reveling in the complexity of our strange lives.

The two silent Ss of Des Moines beckon twenty-three-year-old Vivette with a sexy finger, a promise. So, in the mid-1990s, she convinces Grandpa Joe-Joe to sell his Buick for twenty dollars, leaves behind her friends, her job at a hip New England bakery, and an affair with a married man, and moves to Iowa. Margaret, who left the same bakery years earlier on her own restless quest, offers pointers from her cautiously settled Nebraska life. In a story of lust and longing, love and loneliness, disappointment and desire stretching from the East Coast to the West, these two pioneering women navigate through secrets, lies, decisions, and compromises shared over pool tables, postcards, and shots of whiskey. Starting up, starting over, slowing down, they crisscross each other's lives like highways on a map, always escaping, flying toward a dreamt future, and trying to avoid the charted course.