Summer is ending, and soon we’ll be busy with our fall activities. But I find myself reflecting on the summer activities that inspired my creativity. One stands out in my mind—the Waterfront Blue’s Festival.

For more than ten years, Alan and I have gone to this festival, except in 2020 of course. Everything from what performers and audience members wear to how everyone responds to the music has sparked ideas for new stories and inspired characters for those stories. I can actually read something I wrote and point out details that came from the Waterfront Blue’s Festival.

After the pandemic and several years with extreme temperatures, running such a huge event became untenable for the organizers. Alan and I were afraid they’d stop holding it, but instead they scaled it back this summer from four stages to two stages, and from four days to two days. To my delight, it worked. The festival had an energy that we hadn’t seen in years. And this year I was able to check out how they ran their sound system, which helped me describe it correctly in my most recent story about a sound engineer.

Have any annual events inspired your art?