Way back when I was a wee lad in high school, we were required to do community volunteer work. We had to do anywhere from thirty to fifty hours of volunteer service a year depending on what grade we were in.
The organization that I volunteered for was the Victoria Literary Arts Festival. They had administrative tasks that had to be done. Being a computer geek, I fit into this position fairly well. After two years of good work, I began assuming more responsibilities. By this time, their webmaster quit due to health issues. I offered to take over their website because I was starting to learn about building websites, and this would be an awesome way to gain experience and to help build up a portfolio of work.
I gave the whole website a facelift, and optimized it. Traffic to the website increased every year, and it was a great communication tool for the festival. They were very grateful for my technical expertise, and all was well for a while. I managed their website between 1999-2004.
On the festival's tenth anniversary, the Governor General was recognizing this organization's accomplishments, and I was invited to an exclusive dinner party at the Governor General's house. This was one fancy event. Top hats, monocles, the works. I had to buy a new suit for the event. It was an open buffet, and there was a giant pile of candied smoke salmon. It was heavenly.
The dinner party's conversation was fairly funny though. Here I am with a room full of social elites, award winning authors, and literary buffs debating and talking about books that the festival was featuring, and I hadn't read any of the books. Boy did I feel out of place. I was the tech guy I didn't read any of the poetry! In either case, the festival director was taking me around, introducing me to authors and people, and I tried my best to say something intelligent when someone asked what I thought about a certain book.
This was the peak of the festival. Dining with the Govenor General, piles of smoke salmon, this was the life. Then, things started to unravel. Every November, I would be contacted by the festival director about updates to the website. One year, no one contacted me. I checked the website, and the domain name had expired because someone didn't renew it, and to my shock, someone had bought the domain, and replaced the site with a porn site. It's as if the festival just vanished. I never had closure, and I never knew what happened.
A few weeks ago, I read that the annual FolkFest was not going to happen this year because of budgetary reasons, and this got me thinking about the Victoria Literary Arts Festival again. So, I started investigating, and ultimately I found an article in the Times Colonist entitled, "Writers Fest Scales Down To Survive." That's a good sign right?
The Victoria Literary Arts Festival has survived -- but this year's edition comes closer to a novelette than a novel. Late last year, the writers' festival nearly collapsed in the face of the board's resignation and faltering leadership. Now, the Victoria Literary Arts Festival (VLAF) is back for an eleventh season, albeit in abridged form....This year the annual festival has been reduced to two days from last year's four. Its budget is slashed to approximately $35,000 from $150,000. While previous Victoria literary festivals undertook the expense of flying in dozens of international writers, the 2004 version has trimmed costs by inviting mostly Victoria and Vancouver authors, including P.K. Page, Marilyn Bowering, Bill Gaston, John Gould and Patrick Lane. Money was also saved by offering smaller honorariums to authors and having board members pick up duties formerly carried out by paid VLAF staff (there are no paid staff this year).
In either case, this does give me some closure. It's a shame that they just disappeared though.
