Claire Mabey Art blogger Arts Insight

My knees and ankles were really swollen last week. It happened gradually over six days of the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival standing, running, sprinting a little, coffee queue, standing, workshop, upstairs, downstairs, backstage, front of house, signing queue, coffee queue, info desk, backstage, and so on.

Working on a festival can be an exercise in endurance, and just plain exercise.

I fell into festival work - I think most of us do.

One day I was bored legal publisher and the next I was in the marketing team for Auckland Arts Festival. The hours were long and the pay pretty lean, but the experience was a seismic shift.

The pace, the variety, the depth of creativity, organisation, passion and thought: no matter how big or small, behind the scenes of a festival lies a unique eco-system.

It's hard to pin down just why festivals matter. There are plenty of statistics on attendance, on launching shows to an international audience, on the continuity of post-festival events.

Auckland, for example, had a stellar 2013 festival with record ticket sales and attendance numbers. But it's the immeasurable value that makes the biggest impact on me – and that makes the hours and the swollen joints worth it – it's the impact on the public, on public spaces, the unexpected reactions.

People moved liked shoals of fish between the Auckland Writers & Readers festival sessions last weekend.

Among them teenagers, adults, the elderly, locals, visitors, tourists, people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds. And each person gained an insight, and experience, an hour or two of something a bit different from the usual.

You tend to meet a lot of memorable people during a festival.

But two particularly stood out to me at this one: one a 16-year-old festival attendee and the other a sound technician.

The 16-year-old came to the festival every day to see the writers who inspired her own desire to be an author – she wanted to know how she might one day stand on stage and tell 1000+ people her story. On the last day she told me she was going home to start her novel.

I met the sound technician backstage with the author Edward Rutherford, who got us talking about poetry, as he recited Robbie Burns to warm up.

‘I've never done a festival before', the sound technician said.

‘And what do you think?' I asked.

‘Well I never would have come to this if I wasn't working, but now I want to pick up the pen! These guys are awesome, Edward's awesome, Poetry Idol is awesome! Makes you realise how it's good to try things aye', he replied.

So I think that's why we do it. Festivals inspire, they offer a space for talent, they bring people together.
I just need better shoes …