Lyndsey Fineran, Artistic Director of the Auckland Writers Festival Waituhi o Tāmaki, has the dubious distinction of being the first Life & Leisure interviewee to nominate a thoroughly unremarkable desk chair as her ‘best seat’. She promises she can explain. Words Claire Finlayson.

It’s not just a ho-hum seat choice that Lyndsey Fineran has to defend here; the view from her desk chair is charmless too: a beauty-barren grey brick wall in suburban Auckland. She’s not trying to be contrary – it’s just that the view inside her head is so expansive and compelling that she has little need for a dazzling throne or exquisite sea view – well, not while she’s busy nailing down the programme for this country’s biggest literary festival.

At the time of interview, Lyndsey is deep in the weeds on the planning front, so this desk chair pretty much owns her. She’s not always so seat-monogamous. ‘I do leave my office chair. There are times of the year when my bum does make it into van seats and kayaks and on top of mountains.’

As intense and demanding as it is, curating a festival programme is also a giddy thrill. ‘I get to have this beautiful, rich, interior life and a job where I get to connect with the most interesting and kind and fascinating people.’

To the onlooker, Lyndsey is the person who gets to stand onstage in a nice frock on festival opening night and rub shoulders with literary luminaries. She says these glamorous moments represent about one per cent of the role. ‘I’m not sure people realise how much of festival planning is just ‘ass in chair’. It involves lots of creative intellectual energy and practical work. I feel like every neuron in my brain gets used most days.’

This peppy neuron party is what keeps Lyndsey so seat-glued. ‘I remember hearing the novelist David Mitchell compare his brain to a compost heap. He feeds it with a whole range of things – some nutritious, some less so, some intentional, some things getting in there by chance – and what it reduces down to is this rich, delicious, concentrated substance that contains the essence of all those things.

I picture a resulting festival programme in a similar way. You’ve read, researched, listened, collaborated and thought all year and hopefully what emerges is a distillation of all of that and is appropriately rich and delicious.’

Then there’s the jeopardy. Wrangling over 200 international and local guests across a multi-pronged six-day programme is like building a giant jigsaw that keeps rupturing. Lyndsey says a former colleague compared the fraught business of festival planning to wrestling a jellyfish into a string bag – there’s always one little tentacle poking out somewhere. So how does she not go crackers dealing with all those wayward tentacles? She credits natural stubbornness, a sense of perspective and the company of good humans. ‘These jobs are busy and they can be a bit lonely at times because you carry a lot in your head and on your shoulders, but knowing you’ve got a cracking team and incredible friends and family around you really helps.’

When the Auckland Writers Festival kicks off in May, Lyndsey will get to see the results of all her composting. ‘The magic of writers’ festivals – the thing that makes all that jellyfish-wrangling worth it – is that when they are up and running you see writers being treated like rock stars and having fervent discussions with each other, and readers buying big stacks of books. The ripple effect is just immense, and you never know what one book or one bit of dialogue or one statement will trigger in someone’s mind. I think that’s really beautiful.’

As for that disappointing brick situation beyond her desk – she thinks she can make friends with it. ‘Perhaps I can pass that wall view off as a productivity hack?’