I began the day by heading into the office at 10am and was asked to quickly do some odd jobs to start off the day. I was set the task of putting together lanyards with name tags to hand to the poets of the festival. After this Theresa had to go and introduce an event of the festival and asked me, in her absence, to print and laminate the pictures we had of all of the poets so that they could be hung in the festival tent. I set to work on this although I had a little trouble as the photos were all saved in different formats and they came out in different sizes as a result. However, I manged to sort it out by making sure every image was saved as a jpeg file.
A couple of festival volunteers, Anne and Neil, were sent up by Theresa to give me a hand and together we managed to cut and laminate every image. They were an interesting pair, both on the creative writing MA and specialising in poetry. I had a really nice chat with both of them, making some monotonous work seem a little better.
After this was done I did some social media work as that was my predominant task for the day. John eventually asked me to drop off some things to the festival tent for some of the poets, including food vouchers and a list of competition winners, and I ran into Theresa on the way who needed me to help her carry things down to the tent. I came back and forward to the office for much of the morning, running around and doing odd jobs!
When I returned to the tent I was asked to hang the newly laminated photos around using string. Another volunteer helped me with this job and we struggled through it together! Whilst we were doing this one of the festival poets, Andrew McMillan came in and I had a chat with him, embarrassing myself as he realised that I was the one taht misspelled his name on twitter... He took it well and we had a laugh together about it.
It took me a good while to hang these photos as it was a really fiddly job but eventually the whole tent was hung with photos of poets on all sides!
Following this Theresa had asked me to attend events and tweet and so I made my way to Northern Stage and began working away. The first event was a reading by Emily Hasler, Andrew Mcmillan and Phoebe Power. I really enjoyed this event and in fact, the poetry of Phoebe Power inspired to go out to the tent and buy her book! (Despite my slight aversion to poetry!) It was a murder mystery written in poetry and I loved the idea behind it, it just seemed like another level of creative talent and I really enjoyed it. Whilst I was hear I posted on social media, getting quotes from the live event and putting them online.
The second event I attended was the Royal Literary Fund Lecture with Ishion Hutchinson and I did the same sort of thing, lifting quotes and putting them on social media. It was a really interesting discussion and Ishion was a very sincere and heartful man.
Following this I went home for the day but I loved my first day at the festival!