I came straight into the office today and got on with social media work, advertising the day's events to anybody who might be attending. I was here for a couple of hours or so doing this as well as odd jobs that they needed doing quickly.
However I was expected to spend the entire day at the festival, sitting in on events and posting as they happened.
I started this task with the third event of the day, the reading by students on the Creative Writing MA who I had met the day before. They had some poets up from London, as well as the Newcastle cohort as it is a split course.
It was quite a stressful event where social media is concerned as there was so many poets all performing one after the other and I had to make sure I had all of their names, poems and quotes online. I didn't manage to pay much attention to the event itself as I was focussed on my laptop screen!
Half an hour after this was the announcement of the winners of the competition, both the junior one and regular one. This event was even more stressful than the last! As John wanted every winner announced online as they were announced and then those reading at the event to have a quote and the title of their poem advertised. As there was close to 30 winners and 20 readers, I was none stop for the entire event and it flew by!
Following this I went into the festival tent to check on my work from the previous day and chatted to the woman that had helped me set it up.
Later on I attended the reading of Mary Ruefle, an American poet and by far the most well known at the festival. She was really amazing, such a lovely person and so skilled at what she does. Theresa was telling me that she lives in America and doesn't own a computer and so all of their correspondence was with letters, all of which she had drawn lovely pictures on before sending. I tweeted about the event, took some photos for social media and then headed out as this was my last event of the day.