World Enough and Time by Fred Carlisle

The People, Places and Ideas That Shaped a Life

A Record of a Life Well-Lived in World Enough and Time

Traverse City, Michigan—How have important people and places influenced your lives?  Fred  Carlisle answers these questions for himself and readers in “World Enough and Time: The People, Places and Ideas That Shaped a Life.”

Carlisle, a retired university provost and professor, explores how we understand the world and how it shaped who we become in this utterly human reflection on his life story.

With a title drawn from Andrew Marvell’s 1680’s seduction poem To His Coy Mistress, Carlisle confesses, “I’m simply trying to seduce time” as he reflects on those who influenced his life. These include his parents, his wife, as well as friends and colleagues whom he renders in vivid and sometimes heart-rending life.

His writing  also captures the magical beauty of places like Lake Michigan, the small-town world of his hometown Delaware, Ohio, and Clover Hollow in Virginia’s mountains where his neighbors helped him discovered the perspective he needed to recover his past.

Carlisle’s book “is a searcher’s book – a stubborn, loving, in-love-with-language attempt to ‘bridge the vast gap between what we are and what we long for.’ Places and people, lives once lived, distances embraced and overcome - all of this comes so vividly to life in Carlisle’s probing, clear-eyed excavation of his life’s deepest sources … .” writes reviewer and noted poet Thomas Gardner.

Carlisle brings to his writing his years as an English professor, provost and accomplished author. His career included 20 years at Michigan State as a professor and administrator followed by serving as provost at Miami University of Ohio and Virginia Tech.

Advance Praise

"Fred Carlisle's World Enough and Time is a searcher's book—a stubborn, loving, in-love-with-language attempt to ‘bridge the vast gap between what we are and what we long for.’ Places and people, lives once lived, distances embraced and overcome—all of this comes so vividly to life in Carlisle's probing, clear-eyed excavation of his life's deepest sources that Whitman's ‘Who touches this touches a man’ comes continually to mind." —Thomas Gardner, author of Poverty Creek Journal, Sundays, and A Place of Encounter: On Poetry, Teaching, and Faith and many books of literary criticism

"Fred Carlisle’s World Enough and Time flows with poetic wisdom, reflective of a lifetime of dedication to family, friends, and higher education. Throughout, we become immersed in an understanding of the challenges confronting those who seek to garner meaning in academic purpose as well as the purpose of meaning in the life of the mind. The author’s eloquence remains constant throughout, but remains stolid in the face of loss, hurt, harm, and suffering. But a joy emerges as well: as depicted across the many examples of how to live with consummate dignity but also within the realms of a dignified simplicity across multiple places and locations. This is a beautiful book written by one who has lived on the front lines of relational struggles as well as through a wide range of professional, administrative, and academic contexts. The author resounds with an abiding commitment towards the significance of an academic life and to the spirit of education. At the end, this is a story told about a life in education brought to fruition not only in the name of the present, but at the behest of future generations." —Edward Weisband, author of Macabresque and Resignation in Protest: Loyalty to Team Versus Loyalty to Conscience 

The Author

Fred Carlisle grew up in Delaware, Ohio, the hometown he writes about in World Enough and Time. After military service and graduate school, he enjoyed a long academic career as an English professor, mainly at Michigan State University, and later as a provost at Miami University in Ohio and then Virginia Tech. He has written studies of Walt Whitman and Loren Eiseley and four memoirs—among them, Hollow and Home: A Story of Self and Place and The Lake Effect: A Lake Michigan Mosaic. He lives with his wife and favorite editor, Beth Obenshain, on her family farm in the Virginia mountains.

The Book

World Enough and Time: The People, Places, & Ideas That Shaped a Life

Fred Carlisle

268 pages; 6 x 9 inches; B/W

Biographies & Memoirs, Professionals & Academics, Educators

ISBN: 978-1-968761-94-3, $18.95 (Softcover)

ISBN: 978-1-968761-93-6, $26.95 (Hardcover)

Mission Point Press, September 18, 2026

Copies are available in Bookshop.org and Amazon.com. For more information or to arrange for signings and events, contact the author at efredcarlisle@bellsouth.net.