Hay Festival Day Three

This is the final edition to the Hay Festival blog posts as it as our final day at Hay festival as part of the Beacons Project. We didn't want to leave as it was so good and gave us a lot of inspiration. Similar to the day before we had to get up very early to be at the festival but we were used to it by now. Our day was packed with different events as well as different workshops.

We started with breakfast with Peter Florence, the founder of Hay Festival. He sat and ate breakfast with us and talked to us about our aspirations for the future as well as giving us advice and talked about how he started the festival and how it has grown. It was a very interesting breakfast and very different but it was amazing to talk to him and get advice from him.

We then went to see a performance of 3000 chairs, which  was based off of the poem by Nicola Davies 'The Day War Came'. It was a very interesting performance and really did intrigue us and inspire us.

We followed this with a one on one workshop with Oliver Balch who talked to us about his experiences of writing and working as well as giving us advice on writing and getting published. He was happy to answer any of the questions we had and was very easy to talk to.

After our workshop we went to a talk about 'Utopias' which was very interesting and gave us an idea of things to write about and how to fictionalise them. It also helped with gaining a wider knowledge of different things and therefore improved our knowledge of different topics like many other events that we wouldn't have necessarily chosen to gone to ourselves but found them very interesting.

We then went to a talk about 'The Cyber Effect' which in todays society is a very big topic as it talked about the internet and how dangerous it is and how it is consuming our lives as well as the positives of the internet and therefore it linked back to the discussion of utopias and therefore gave us an epiphany moment as we were very intrigued by how some of our talks over lapped and flowed into each other as if they were having a debate and therefore we found this very interesting.

Our last talk was Alex Wheatle who started talking about his life and how it related to his novels and although they were fiction you could see aspects of his life that had influenced him in his writing and therefore showed where he got his inspiration from. It was very interesting to see this as well as listening to him read as he was very passionate about it and also very happy to answer the audiences questions at the end of his talk.

Our last event of the day before our entertainment was a workshop with Tom Bullough. Although, we had little time with him to do the workshop we still managed to have one foot in England and one foot in Wales at the same time as we were on the Black Mountain where the cover of his book of 'ADDlands' is taken. He got us to do a bit of writing about our surroundings using our senses and we even got to make friends with a horse as it came closer and closer and tried to eat out notepads but it was very interesting. We even got to have a chat with him about our interests at the bottom before leaving and he gave us some great advice. We also got many pictures from the mountain:

 

 

 

 

Later in the evening we went to see Will Young perform and he was amazing it was the perfect way to end our time at Hay Festival even if we didn't want to leave. We can't wait until next years Hay Festival and hope to go to their festival in the winter, If you have any questions or advice or want to know more leave a comment, Don't forget to follow our social media linked at the bottom of the page and we will see you soon with another blog post.

ThePolkaDotDaffodil x