Write the Neighborhood: Morningside

Since 2021, local writer Sherrie Flick has led the popular Walk & Write Tour series for the Office for Public Art. The fall of 2023 marks the third season of this successful program, after two seasons of exploring Downtown Pittsburgh, Hazelwood, the North Shore, and the South Side.

These hour-and-a-half tours traverse city neighborhoods connected to, or nearby water, and introduce tour-goers to various walking trails and footpaths that run along Pittsburgh’s three rivers and other waterways.

As participants walk these areas, attendees have the opportunity to exercise their creative writing skills as they respond to Flick’s writing prompts at each tour stop. The writing prompts are unique to each tour route and correspond with its surroundings.

All writing abilities are welcome and no previous writing experiences is necessary. Please bring paper and a writing implement; wear good walking shoes, and bring your curiosity to environments that may be new to you.

Write the Neighborhood: Morningside

The Write the Neighborhood: Morningside Tour denotes a fun shift in Flick’s Walk & Write series. For the first time, Flick will invite a guest writer to lead the walking tour in a neighborhood of their choice. Flick’s writing prompts will be in response to the guest’s route and selection of readings at each stop.

This Walk & Write Tour will introduce visiting writer, Joy Katz. Come gather inspiration from Katz’s favorite neighborhood walk. Katz will read aloud at each stop as participants walk (and write) during this tour of Morningside. The tour will be a mostly flat walking surface on sidewalks.

About Joy Katz

Joy Katz loves writing on the shifting border between poetry, nonfiction, and memoir. Her latest essay is “Tennis is the Opposite of Death: A Proof,” in The Paris Review, a 2022 Best American Essays finalist, and her latest poetry collection is All You Do Is Perceive, a National Poetry Series finalist. A Writing Pittsburgh fellow, she was writer-in-residence at Grasso Sausage, the last Italian business in Larimer. Honors for her work include National Endowment for the Arts, Barbara Deming Foundation, and Stegner fellowships, and she collaborates in the social practice art collective IfYouReallyLoveMe.org, whose most recent project was live music for shift workers. Joy teaches off the tenure track in Carlow University’s Madwomen in the Attic writing workshops.

About Sherrie Flick

Sherrie Flick is the author of four books, including her 2018 short story collection Thank Your Lucky Stars (Autumn House Press). Recent work appears in New England Review, Ploughshares, and Booth. Co-editor for the 2023 anthology Flash Fiction America (W. W. Norton), she also served as series editor for The Best Small Fictions 2018 and is a senior editor at SmokeLong Quarterly. Her debut essay collection, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist is forthcoming from University of Nebraska Press in 2024. For over 20 years she has fostered writing programs in unlikely spaces.

Directions and Parking

Participants will meet at the corner of Elgin Street and Negley Avenue. Registrants will receive an email reminder about the meeting spot the day before the tour.

Street parking is available in the surrounding area.

If taking public transit, there are stops available at: Negley Avenue + Bryant that serves route 71A; St. Clair Street + Callowhill Street that serves routes 71A and 71B; Jancey Street + Hampton Street that serves route 75 Ellsworth; Chislett Street + Hampton Street that serves routes 75 Ellsworth and 87; and Stanton Avenue + Negley Avenue that serves routes 75 Ellsworth and 87.
For more information on public transit, and to plan your trip, please visit the Pittsburgh Regional Transit website HERE.