NYWF Daily Wrap-Up - Thursday

Photo by Alan Weedon

I’m woken at six by the sounds of children playing and a dog barking. But not like in cute, naw suburbia you’re alright kinda way, and more in a good god I went to bed at 1am and I will kill you kinda way. Miraculously, I manage to go back to sleep for ages and wake up bleary-eyed and stunned by the late hour with the rest of the household.

It’s a slow start, it’s the first day of the National Young Writers’ Festival, but events don’t actually kick off until 4, so we eat pancakes, talk, read. Fin draws little squares in preparation for Comic Jam, I read all of Alex’s NYWF blogs dating back three years and try not to freak out that I am officially taking on the daily blogger role this time around.

We catch a bus into town eventually and go to the Meet and Greet. We meet… we greet. There are lots of new names and faces and a few I know from previous years. Eventually there’s the suggestion that we should congregate at the Great Northern. This is a great idea except the staff of the Great Northern are not expecting 40 something writery types to suddenly congregate there. I’m pretty sure we literally cleared them out of cider. Possibly burgers also. There was an old drunk “DJing" in the corner, which was mostly just him pulling the volume up and down on various Fleetwood Mac tracks until the bartender made him stop. The Great Northern is not a venue this year but it’s still the place I associate with dancing, drinking, wearing a hippo suit and other important writers’ festival activities. It will always have a place in my heart. 

We head up to the Cambridge Side Bar at 8 for Comic Jam, where artists draw all over butchers’ paper taped to the walls. It’s seriously cool, and their stuff looks amazing. While I’m waiting at the bar I meet a horse acupuncturist, which is not a sentence I thought I’d ever say but there you go. After that it’s the Launch Orgy, which is a thing I’ve been looking forward to all day. Six literary magazines (well five and a conglomerate) each have ten minutes to sell themselves. It’s kind of amazing -  there’s soundcloud poetry, candles, a dildo, Big Brother, gameshows and a piñata. Probably the highlight for me was Grapple Magazine’s segment, which involved actual grappling in actual wrestling unitards to a glorious mashup. 

The festival has officially kicked off and I’m so pleased to be here and so keen to do things. It’s going to be a wonderful, busy, exciting couple of days and I hope you enjoy these little snapshots as they go up. If you’re here, you can keep track of what people are saying by searching the #NYWF14 hashtag and you can join in the conversation there as well. Otherwise, see you at the bar. 


I'll be doing a daily wrap up every day at the National Young Writers' Festival, you can read them here or at www.youngwritersfestival.org where you'll also find a tonne of other cool content.