Young adult fiction writer Rachael Lippincott came to Pittsburgh to study but stayed after falling in love with both the city and her wife. The best-selling author and her co-author and wife, Alyson Derrick, not only still live in the Pittsburgh area but also use the location in many of their novels. “She Gets the Girl is set entirely in Pittsburgh at the University of Pittsburgh. Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh starts off in Pittsburgh with my main character Audrey’s family running a corner store on Penn Avenue before she gets sent back in time to Regency England,” Lippincott said. “All the rest of my books, even if not explicitly stated, take place somewhere in Pennsylvania.”
Lippincott said that she wanted to be a writer from a young age. “Reading was my first love, and then the possibility of being a writer and creating my own stories really clicked in third grade. My teacher, Mrs. Snyder, would give me extra writing prompts to do during recess and at home. Simple stuff. ‘The door opens and...’ or ‘Imagine you had an alligator as a pet...’ I pretty much just wrote Magic Treehouse fanfiction, but the rest was history,” she said.
For Derrick, writing didn’t come until later. “I actually got a pretty late start, I think. Definitely a much later start than Rachael. I feel like a lot of authors I meet say that they’ve always been writers, that they’ve been coming up with stories as long as they can remember, but I didn’t get into it until my junior year of college when I took a class at Pitt taught by Siobhan Vivian called Writing Youth Literature,” she explained. “And from then on, I was really hooked. No one had ever given me such freedom in class to write exactly what I wanted to write.”
Like her wife, Derrick came to Pittsburgh to study at the University of Pittsburgh and never left. And also like Lippincott, Derrick feels that Pittsburgh is an important part of their novels. “Pittsburgh was a huge part of my debut novel, She Gets the Girl, that I wrote with my wife. That book was based on my own love story with my wife, so it’s really special to me. I didn’t realize how big of a part Pittsburgh played in it until yinzers started coming up to us after publication to tell us how much they loved seeing their city finally represented in young adult literature. I love setting stories in places I’m very familiar with, so I’m sure Pittsburgh will be making an appearance in some upcoming novels as well,” she said.
Sherrie Flick, who writes both fiction and nonfiction, has been a published author since 1990. “I’ve always wanted to be a writer. I don’t think I necessarily knew what that meant when I was young, but my undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in English literature with a creative writing focus,” she said.
Flick grew up in nearby Beaver Falls but moved away from the region for over a decade before she returned. “My plan wasn’t to move back to Pittsburgh, but my husband and I came to visit a friend. He explored while I was visiting, and he fell in love with the region, with the architecture, and felt it was an area where he could create a nonresidential artist studio space,” she said.
The couple has now lived in the city for over 25 years. “I love living in the South Side Slopes—all the city steps and great views. The hilly landscape is fascinating,” she said. “When I first moved here, the thing that struck me about Pittsburgh was that there was room to innovate, to try things, to start programs, and experiment. I still see the city this way, as a big incubator for the arts.”
It is those steps of the South Side Slopes that Flick referred to that have helped inspire some of her writings. “I thought that I would write one essay about the city steps, and I started researching them—that’s what first drew me in and kept me writing creative nonfiction. Eventually, I began to examine the question, ‘Why am I here?’” she said. Flick’s most recent book, Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, published in September, is a collection of essays that examines her relationship to the region.
This is the perfect place for Flick. “I like Pittsburgh’s unknowable quality. Just as soon as you think you have this city figured out, it throws you a curveball. This keeps it interesting,” she said.
Elizabeth Pagel-Hogan writes both nonfiction and fiction. “I am primarily a children’s writer, but I like to say I write for anyone who is young at heart,” she said. Pagel-Hogan and her husband came to Pittsburgh for his graduate studies 24 years ago and ended up staying. “Pittsburgh is where my husband and I started our family, and we have made lots of wonderful friends,” she said.
Pagel-Hogan writes for both commercial publishers and educational publishers, books that are sold to educational entities. “I haven’t always been a writer as my main job, but I’ve always written—even when I was young. In seventh grade, I started a literary journal in my very small private school,” she said. “As I grew up, I wrote for my college newspaper, then I took creative writing classes in grad school. I moved to Pittsburgh and wrote for local newspapers and blogs. Eventually, I took the leap to become a full-time writer.”
At any given time, Pagel-Hogan said she will be working on half a dozen projects. “Right now, I’m working on two poems and three picture books. I’m always juggling projects, doing the research, planning things out,” she said.
Pagel-Hogan has written manuscripts based on locations in and around the Pittsburgh area, but whether or not the setting is obvious, the region is always on her mind. “They will be mentally set in Pittsburgh. I think, ‘This is happening in Schenley Park,’ or ‘This is in my favorite place in North Park,’” she said.
Pittsburgh is a great location for her writing, Pagel-Hogan said. “Pittsburgh is so geographically unique that you can use so many different locations here for so many different settings.”
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