Ian FitzGerald’s professional background in advertising led to teaching at Alberta University of the Arts in Calgary, Alberta. He has trifled with poetry since teenage and is getting dangerously close to thinking he should take it seriously, maybe. He is quite keen on poetry and hopes one day that will be requited.
His poem “Decibels” was
published in We Are One – Poems from the Pandemic, 2020; “Sounding” in Subterrranean
Blue Poetry Volume X, Issue IV, 2021; “Through a Certain Mirror,” Framed & Familiar: 101
Portraits (Wet Ink Books 2022); “Ear Drums,” FreeFall Magazine, Fall
2022; “Depth” and “The Stiffer the Bristle, the Better the Brush (off),” FreeFall
Magazine, Fall 2023 as well as two ‘slogan poems’ accepted for publication
in Journal of Customer Behaviour, Westburn Publishing, U.K. in
2022/2023.
His chapbook Each Mouthful Dripping… recently appeared from
above/ground press.
Q: How long were you in Ottawa, and what first brought you here? What took you away?
Moved to Ottawa to attend Carleton and stayed there two and a half years. I left and moved to Banff to be a ski bum for a winter after the CRTC revoked CKCU-FM’s advertising license ( I was selling ads for the station at the time).
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I started writing radio ads when CKCU got its FM license in 1975 – for various record albums, head shops, jeans stores etc. I had dabbled with poetry in high school and continued it as a sideline while in Ottawa. At CKCU, there was a tremendous group of talented individuals, many from journalism, and I got involved in writing and broadcasting during that time.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all? Have there been subsequent shifts due to where you have lived since?
There was a bit of a ‘no holds barred’ approach to the creative radio ads we made. We were constrained by regulation insofar as claims the advertising could make and that discipline encouraged innovative thinking and writing. I came to understand how to make ‘theatre of the mind’ using words (and production). Since, living and working in advertising in Montreal and Calgary my poetry was often neglected for years at a time; I kept up some connection with workshopping groups and so on. It was really the pandemic that re-energized me as a poet.
Q: What did you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What did Ottawa provide, or allow?
My time in Ottawa was heavily focused on CKCU-FM. At the time, as the only youth-oriented FM radio station in the city, it attracted a great many talented individuals. There was a music focus of course and I was exposed to a lot of music that I hadn’t known before and that opened my eyes (and ears) to culture that was outside of the mainstream.
Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How had the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
Because I started writing professionally in radio, I feel like it’s never left me. I worked in TV and ad agencies and touched many different media types. But radio is really a writer’s medium (as is direct mail which I also gravitated towards) and even now, teaching in a graphic design program that emphasizes visuals, I love radio’s ability to use words, to create a picture in the listener’s mind ¾ like good poetry does!
Q: What are you working on now?
Currently, I am creating a full-length book of
poems that stem from known advertising slogans.
The book will have a lot of visual content to augment the poetry ¾
to
offer a visual representation of the product associated with the slogan, the
words in the slogan or the era or scenario that the slogan suggests (see the
chapbook Each Mouthful Dripping…
from above/ground). I am also working
with artists to make short animations as part of my performative readings of
these poems. My day job is teaching
advertising, brand design and writing at Alberta University of the Arts in
Calgary.
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