When Peter Oresick opened a savings account at a bank, he received a free copy of “From These Hills, From These Valleys,” a 1976 anthology of working-class fiction set in Western Pennsylvania. The book, he often said, changed his life.
The stories resonated with him because he had Ruthenian roots and was the third generation of a Ford City family to work in Armstrong County’s Pittsburgh Plate Glass mill. Each week, after church, his family hoisted Rolling Rock beer over breakfast. One summer, he demolished a section of the Ford City mill; the next, he labored in PPG’s Meadville rolling mill in Crawford County.
A prolific poet, printer, publisher and painter of sacred and secular icons, Mr. Oresick celebrated and epitomized the unflagging work ethic that characterized so many Western Pennsylvania immigrants. A conscientious, patient professor who taught at Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Pittsburgh and Chatham University, he mentored a new generation of poets with unwavering curiosity, kindness and a humble manner.
He wrote or edited 10 books, including “Iconoscope: New and Selected Poems,” which appeared last year, plus a collection of Willa Cather’s 10 Pittsburgh stories, which will be released in October by Carnegie Mellon University Press. Mr. Oresick, 60, of Highland Park, died Saturday of brain cancer at UPMC Shadyside.
Poet Judith Vollmer, of Regent Square, was his colleague and friend for 41 years.
“He writes the essential lyrical narrative poems of the post-Carl Sandburg generation but he sets them in Western Pennsylvania. He uses Eastern European diction and syntax and then he elevates that to something captivating,” Ms. Vollmer said. “He has such a wide readership. He is able to reach readers of poetry and readers who are new to poetry.”
Mr. Oresick was influenced by what Ms. Vollmer called “the generation of 1929,” including poets Gerald Stern, Adrienne Rich, Jack Gilbert and Galway Kinnell. He also loved the work of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz and the Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva.
As a college freshman in 1973, he took a poetry class from Ed Ochester at the University of Pittsburgh. Mr. Ochester, who edits the poetry series for the University of Pittsburgh Press, became his mentor and friend. Mr. Oresick also met his future wife, Stephanie Flom, in that class.
Four years later, as a college senior, Mr. Oresick published his first book, “The Story of Glass: Poems.” After graduating, he taught English in public high schools, including Carrick and Keystone Oaks. When his first son, William, was born in 1980, he stayed home to look after the boy but also earned a master of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh in 1981.
In 1984, he went to work at the University of Pittsburgh Press, later becoming its marketing director and associate director.
“He loved regional history and poetry. Those were the two things that made him especially love that job,” Ms. Flom said.
Mr. Oresick tirelessly promoted Thomas Bell’s 1941 book, “Out of This Furnace: A Novel of Immigrant Labor in America.” At the urging of CMU English professor David P. Demarest, the University of Pittsburgh Press reissued the out-of-print novel in 1976. Bell’s tale examines Pittsburgh’s steelworker culture and shows the struggles of three generations of immigrants living in Braddock and laboring at the Edgar Thomson Works. Still taught in college, “Out of This Furnace” is so popular that the University of Pittsburgh Press maintains a stock of 6,000 copies.
Mr. Oresick left the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1995 and taught publishing and writing for a year at Emerson College in Boston, Mass. From 1996 through 2004, he worked for Graphic Arts Technical Foundation, where he learned about on-demand printing and publishing. As vice president of publishing and education, he traveled to Latvia and Kazakhstan and also taught at CMU’s Tepper School of Business.
After teaching for one year at Pittsburgh’s High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, he was hired in 2006 to start Chatham’s online MFA program. He retired last year.
For much of his life, Mr. Oresick compiled a bibliography of more than 2,000 novels, movie scripts and stage plays set in or about Western Pennsylvania. He wrote one-paragraph summaries of more than half of them, which he eventually posted on a blog. This project, “The Pittsburgh Novel,” will be published electronically later this year by The Pennsylvania Center for the Book.
In 2001, he took a class from Peter Pearson, an Episcopal priest who taught icon painting at the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Initially, Mr. Oresick painted icons of saints but in the last four years of his life, he also captured literary giants like Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe.
Along with artists Vanessa German and Chris Ruane, Mr. Oresick’s art will be shown in an exhibition called “Illumination” that opens with a reception Thursday from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. at the Carlow University Art Gallery on the second floor of University Commons. The occasion would have marked his 61st birthday.
He maintained ties with students. Last month, when Mr. Oresick learned that D. Gilson landed a tenure track position at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, Mass., he sent him this text message:
“Congratulations, professor. Don’t let them give you any lip and if they do, make them write sestinas like I did with you.”
“He was an intellectual but he never lost sight of his blue-collar background,” Mr. Gilson said.
Besides his widow, Mr. Oresick is survived by three sons, William, of Cherry Hill, N.J.; David of Polish Hill and Jacob of Oakland plus two brothers, Lawrence of Richland and Robert of Watertown, Mass.
A Mass will be offered at 10 a.m. today at St. John Chrysostom Church, 506 Saline St., Greenfield. Burial will follow in Homewood Cemetery. The family requests memorials to the Society to Preserve the Millvale Murals of Maxo Vanka (vankamurals.org). A memorial service will be held Wednesday at 7 p.m. at Kresge Hall, University Commons, Carlow University.
Marylynne Pitz: mpitz@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1648 or on Twitter: @mpitzpg.
First Published: September 6, 2016, 12:18 p.m.
