I came to Edmonton after six tough years in Toronto.
I moved to Toronto in 2018 for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Toronto Scarborough, during which time I got to know the city as an academic and a writer. I attended what I could – book launches, academic talks, reading series – in academic and non-academic spaces, from Massey College to the Tranzac Club.
Toronto is a tough city to be a writer, but don’t tell anyone from Toronto I said that. If Calgary was defined for me by its surface warmth and Vancouver was defined by an initial paranoia, Toronto seemed to be defined by a strange indifference. Despite meeting many great writers and people, I found it difficult to get any kind of traction in literary community. In hindsight, I think this is because of the difficult geography and economic situation there – something artistic communities in many cities share. When a city is expensive to live in, people flee to the suburbs, making it more difficult to go to readings, to meet at the pub or café, to be social in the way that poets need to be. There were pockets here and there – the community of writers around the university in Scarborough, the organizers of Meet the Presses – and I was grateful for what community I could find, but in the first year and a half I lived there I would continually attend readings and know next to no one there, something that was exacerbated by the pandemic as people retreated from what scene there was. And this was intensified even further by the retreat of my source of income. The postdoc money dried up and I became reliant on unreliable and precarious sessional gigs at several Toronto universities and the crap-shoot vagaries of Canada Council funding. It was several years of keeping my rent paid by leaching what savings I had every time the tap tightened.
So when I saw the University of Alberta’s job ad for a writer-in-residence, I applied. It was one of a series of semi-calculated hail marys to either get out of Toronto or find a more reliable source of income there. Which isn’t to say that Edmonton was a totally random choice. I had a hunch that there might be something worth diving into there, poetically speaking. My experiences in Calgary told me that smaller cities often had compelling scenes that weren’t visible from the outside, scenes that were often more tightly knit. I knew from talking to folks in cities like Winnipeg, Ottawa, and Hamilton that there was something about a smaller, more affordable city that bred community. I caught glimpses of Edmonton’s poetry scene from outside. The work coming out of University of Alberta Press and NeWest Press. The social media posts coming out of places like Glass Bookshop. Stalwart series like the Olive that I knew about from a distance. I had even read a couple times there – once to launch my 2007 debut and once when I was invited by Trisia Eddy Woods and Lainna Lane El Jabi to read at a small press book fair they put together in the dead of winter.
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| Kevin Stebner : photo credit: Jordan Abel |
But maybe more importantly for me, there were a number of interesting folks working at the university itself, some whose work I knew but I had never met before and others who I had never even met. This included my friend and fellow poet Jordan Abel. I knew Jordan from Vancouver, first as poets in the scene there and then as fellow PhD students at Simon Fraser University. While I was in Vancouver, I was fortunate to have Jordan as the substantive editor on my book Coast Mountain Foot. I figured if I threw my hat in the ring, there would be at least one friendly face among the deciders.
So when Jordan phoned me up in late November 2023 to offer me the position, I was surprised and delighted. At least partially I was thinking in economic terms: the gig meant a steady income for nine months. It was also an excuse to move to a city that was closer to my family in Calgary, something that became more urgent (for personal reasons I won’t get into here) as 2024 took shape. When I accepted I thought I would have to navigate an eight-month spell of unemployment and a move across the country before getting to the reward. Luckily one of those precarious academic gigs appeared in the final hours before the winter semester, and I was offered an editorial position at a notable small press, a job they were willing to hold on to for me while I worked as writer-in-residence. When it rains, it pours.
So I navigated those eight months. I moved across the country, stowed all my belongings in my parents southeast Calgary basement, lived with my sister’s family in their northwest Calgary suburb, and worked out the jump to Edmonton. The plan was to move into celebrated writer and creative writing professor Conor Kerr’s basement in a small, but comfortable furnished space that, importantly, didn’t require me to sign a lease. I was on the edge of the Mill Creek Ravine, within walking distance of the Valley LRT line, one bus or two trains to the university.
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| Mercedes Eng : photo credit: Jordan Abel |
When I arrived, I was given an office first on the fourth floor of the Humanities Centre, facing into the building’s “fishbowl,” before being moved down a floor and across the building to an office facing out into the river valley and, in a stroke of irony, directly below Conor’s office. I used this office regularly, going to campus three or four days a week, working in the mornings on the projects I had agreed to with my other employer, the press who had hired me and who wanted me to keep a foot in the door, before spending the afternoons writing or, just as likely, meeting with students or community members. I spent a lot of time just hanging out – what you could call “being in residence.”
I considered it part of my job to show up for things, not just creative but also academic, though I might’ve attended all the events I did even if I didn’t consider it work. The whole thing gave me a bit of nostalgia for living in Vancouver during my PhD, where there were always events and everyone seemed to go. Going to events was a way to make community.
At the university, I participated in several events and instigated a few others. The year began with a welcome reading in the department’s Salter Room, home of the Sheila Watson library, where Jordan introduced me by reading the cursed bio of my name-twin: ex–NFL quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick. Before this event, Jordan had also smartly purchased a significant number of copies of my book Sunny Ways that he had distributed to faculty and students in the department. This took the pressure off because I didn’t feel like I had to sell my book as hard. And this promises to be an ongoing practice: on my way out of Edmonton, Jordan handed me a copy of Half Bads in White Regalia, the memoir by incoming writer-in-residence Cody Caetano.
Jordan and I also started brainstorming other events we could plan under the banner of the writer-in-residence. Eventually we were joined by Sarah Krotz and the staff of the Centre for Literatures in Canada (CLC), who lent some organizational muscle to our ideas. I remember sitting in Jordan’s office, spilling a number of ideas, some realistic and others not so much, before settling on a couple.
Inspired by a cassette on Jordan’s shelf (and an email exchange I had a couple months earlier), I suggested we could bring in Calgary-based writer, musician, artist, bookseller, and librarian Kevin Stebner to talk about his then brand new book Inherent and also his broader punk-rock approach to creativity. In October, Kevin drove down and chatted with us, bringing a trunk load of small press ephemera and the equipment he needed for a short chiptune set as Greyscreen, whose cassette Jordan had in his office. It was exciting to hear Kevin talk about the possibilities of taking cultural production into your own hands.
In January, we brought in another writer: Vancouver poet Mercedes Eng. Mercedes had just launched her fourth book cop city swagger, a bracing slice of social poetics that critiques police practices in Vancouver and elsewhere through an extended media collage. I had just finished working as copy editor on Mercedes’ book and wanted the chance to chat with her some more about it outside of the editorial pressure cooker. Mercedes did three events with us. The first two were university-focused. She visited one of Jordan’s creative writing classes and then joined me for a public reading and chat at the University of Alberta Press space, Henderson Hall, on campus. The third event was more community-focused. When Jordan and I talked to Mercedes, she expressed a wish to somehow engage the community in Edmonton, specifically suggesting that we try to get in touch with the aiya collective, who worked out of Edmonton’s Chinatown. I contacted aiya, who took it from there, collaborating with the excellent Paper Birch Books. All three events were excellent and allowed Mercedes the chance to talk at length about her work – so much she lost her voice!
I participated in a number of other events, readings, and class visits at the university. I was part of translation-related book launches for work by translators Anindita Mukherjee and Odile Cisneros. I visited a number of classes, both creatively and critically focused, at the Edmonton campus and at the Augustana campus in Camrose. I participated in a yearly exchange with the University of Calgary’s writer-in-residence Danny Ramadan that involved a trip back to Calgary.
I also took being in Edmonton as a chance to experience an unfamiliar city’s poetry scene. I tried to go to as many readings and events as I could, including ongoing series like the Olive, the Stroll of Poets, and Vers/e. I read at open mics at all three. Different poetry scenes in different cities are defined in varied ways. Edmonton’s poetry scene is defined by its open mics and the community that crops up around them. I learned very quickly that one path to being seen as a poet in Edmonton involves attending and performing at open mics. I was impressed by the energy and diversity of these scenes and their performers.
I felt especially fortunate to feature at the Vers/e series, a queer-focused reading series organized by Matthew Stepanic and Lucas Crawford. I was a last minute addition, booked when an out-of-town performer couldn’t make it, but I was happy to be given the space. The crowd at Vers/e is particularly warm and receptive. I was able to try out work from an upcoming book that I was in the middle of editing to a strong response. And as part of the series, Matthew produced a beautiful broadside of one of my poems with his Agatha Press, which has been putting out some beautiful chapbooks from local Edmonton authors.
During the open mic readings I was pushed to attend by the great poet and critic Mike Barnholden, who had recently moved to Edmonton but who I knew from my time in Vancouver, I met a number of interesting and exciting writers. Key among them were the organizers of the Edmonton Poetry Festival, in particular Dan Poitras and Steve Pirot, who tapped me at the end of my time in town to read at the festival. I read at four events. Two were university focused – a book launch for Odile Cisneros’ translation of Haroldo de Campos and a CLC-organized roundtable – and the other two were planned by Dan and Steve as a big blowout cabaret at the Roxy Theatre in Westmount. The event was conceptualized by Dan, who wanted to produce an entertaining event that had a poetry focus but wasn’t limited to poetry, including music and dance. The event was so successful that they ran it again a week later. I was the opening act both times and I wouldn’t have it another way. I wouldn’t have wanted to follow some of the excellent acts Dan had booked!
I guess the one thing I haven’t talked about here is my own writing. I didn’t get as much done as I would’ve liked, though I’m not sure I could’ve met whatever goal my unconscious had set for me. I spent significant time editing both a book of poetry that’s due out this fall and a book of nonfiction due out next year. And I started what has turned into a nascent manuscript project, focused on the weirdly toxic political energy of our current “all caps era” – a project that started with me barging into Jordan’s creative writing class to “read a poem I just wrote that might be the worst poem of all time.” I can imagine another version of the residency where I hid out, protected my time more, got a lot more writing done, and had a lot less fun. Sitting here in Calgary and in retrospect, I’d encourage anyone who lucks into a residency position like I did to take the “in residency” part seriously. There’s a lot of critical conversations (and critical fun) that can be leveraged through the chance to work within and adjacent to whatever institutions can afford to indulge a writer’s ideas and support their mere presence in a space that might otherwise feel a little institutional.
Additional photo credits:
top: ryan fitzpatrick in the Salter Room, University of Alberta : Jordan Abel
lower: ryan fitzpatrick at the Vers/e series : Jordan Abel
author photo by Erin Molly Fitzpatrick
ryan fitzpatrick is the author of five books of poetry, including the forthcoming No Depression in Heaven (Talonbooks, 2025) and the recent Sunny Ways (Invisible, 2023). Their first nonfiction book Ace Theory will be published by Book*Hug in 2026. They were the 2024–2025 writer-in-residence in the University of Alberta’s Department of English and Film Studies. You can find them at ryanfitzpatrick.ca.
