Tech Poet's Last (on Campus) Stanza

Excerpted from Tech Today, May 6, 2009 by Dennis Walikainen, senior editor

Retiring Humanities Professor Randy Freisinger had plans already made after his last day on campus Monday. He was going to Isle Royale to find a muse, odds are, or maybe a moose.

And his post-Tech days, if they go as planned, sound like a writer's nirvana:

"I plan to write every morning," he says. "Then get some exercise with the dogs, have some lunch, read in the afternoon. Maybe do some revising, then, after dinner, maybe watch a bit of TV, then read in bed."

He hasn't ruled out teaching again, "in some capacity," and he's got a new chapbook coming out in October from Hol Arts Books, a new publishing house in Tucson, Ariz. "Nostalgia's Thread" features 10 poems, each based on a familiar painting by Norman Rockwell.

It's been a long journey from journalism school at the University of Missouri-Columbia, in part inspired by Ernest Hemingway's journalistic work in Kansas City, where Freisinger was born and raised.

"I was too shy to be a reporter to claim my own beats," he says, "so I ended up covering local service club banquets and hospitals. I did get shifted into sports, and that probably saved me."

Sports came naturally enough to Freisinger that he played on the Missouri baseball team. And journalism, sports and otherwise, would later help his poetry. One of his editors at The Missourian was Ron Powers, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, novelist and non-fiction writer who also served for a number of years as the media reporter for CBS Sunday Morning.

"Ron taught me important lessons about style and economy of language," he says. "We had to memorize the stylebook for the Columbia Missourian, the paper put out by the University's J-school and in competition with another daily in Columbia. The lessons of that stylebook have stayed with me."

After receiving a master's degree in English and American literature at Missouri, Freisinger taught English at the junior-college level for four years before deciding to return for his PhD. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on contemporary American black humor, focusing on writers such as Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey and Thomas Pynchon. He began the project, intending to concentrate on the British novelist Charles Dickens, but his opening chapter on black humor kept expanding.

"Three-hundred pages later, I had not yet begun to examine Dickens," Freisinger says. "I thought I had a dissertation. My advisor agreed. As the old writer's adage goes, 'How do I know what I am going to say until I have said it?'"

He counts among his greatest rewards his 32 years of opportunities to help Michigan Tech students discover the rewards of serious literature, both as readers and as writers.

"They are very intelligent, but they often struggle with ambiguity," he says. Emails from former students now bear witness to what those classes meant to them.

"I just received one over the weekend from a student who took classes with me back in 1984. He said he just wanted me to know I had made a difference. With some years away from campus and a job and family responsibilities, they have acquired a much deeper understanding of ambiguity."

This was much more satisfying, Freisinger says, at a university such as Tech, rather than at a liberal arts college, where he would be "preaching to the congregation."

Another reward was "Blue Ice Anthology," the literary nonfiction publication written by graduate students and produced by undergraduates. The anthology came out of a graduate course Freisinger created in 1987. Fourteen issues later, the project is still alive and well. Graduate students spend the entire fall term working on a piece of serious nonfiction, and in the spring the finished pieces are designed and published by undergraduates in the humanities department's scientific and technical communication program.

"The linkage with the undergrads has been great," he says, "and the response of graduate students totally committed to their own writing has been wonderfully gratifying. Writers take their work much more seriously when they know people beyond the class are actually going to read it."

He believes "Blue Ice" is in good hands with Matt Siegel, an assistant professor in humanities, "and it just might morph into something new, maybe a mix of graduate and undergraduate writing."

Freisinger just attended his last commencement Saturday to hood new PhD graduate Moe Folk, whom Freisinger mentored and whose "Blue Ice" essay was recently republished in New Letters magazine and subsequently nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize.

He also hopes the Spring Writers Series, which he helped to create in the late 1970s, can be resurrected, and he believes Siegel might be just the person to make that happen. "It all depends on funding, of course," Freisinger says of the series that brought over 30 of America's most distinguished writers to campus for readings, seminars and Q-and-As over a period of nearly 25 years.