Thornbury Castle © J Darley

This Sunday I went to see a new play, Picture of Perfection, by Bristol-based playwright Barbie Davies. As it focused on the relationship between author Jane Austin and her sister Cassandra, I was curious to see how Barbie would manage the fine balance between fact and fantasy, especially as while there’s a wealth of information available on Jane herself, but very little on her rather more retiring sister.

As it turned out, Barbie opted to tackle this problem head-on. The play, or rather, dialogue, as there were no sets or props and just the two actresses, was staged in the Tudor Hall at Thornbury Castle, just outside Bristol. Thornbury is the town I grew up in, which gave me enough motivation to attend, coupled with the fact that the proceeds were going to ACT, Arts and Community in Thornbury, an organisation that aims to establish an arts centre in the town.

So, back to the play. As the seventy or so avid audience members waited patiently, there was a sudden kafuffle at the rear of the hall announced the entrance of two women in early 19th century old clothing, complete with rather fetching bonnets. It turned out they were the ghosts of Jane and Cassandra, who proceeded to examine Barbie Davies’ research notes and reminisce about their lives together, their siblings (”Oh, James, he died just two years before me!”) and friends, as well as Jane’s writing.

Excellent acting from Sarah Wiggins as Jane and Barbie as Cassandra made their bond utterly believable, and a selection of slides of the places and people that meant most to them kept us interested. There was plenty of humour, with a childish re-enactment of Jane’s first ever play, complete with a mop playing the part of the third character, and a rather fetching slide of Colin Firth playing Mr Darcy, which popped up to cries of “Who is that? Picture of perfection!”

Balancing out the laughs, however, were moments of beautifully performed anguish as the girls recalled their lost loves, and realised that the home they once adored is now long gone, saved only in fictional form as the inspiration behind passages of Jane’s novels.

The play ended as it began, this time with the two ghosts suddenly realising we could see them, and beating a hasty exit to much laughter and applause.

© J Darley

As the last traces of gold melted into the first morning blues, our hot air balloon rose to meet the dawn. In a large wicker basket we hung beneath a mass of rainbow-striped fabric inflated by a roaring flame. What better way could there be to see Colorado?

“See that mountain with a bump like a pair of feet at one end and a sort of profile at the other? That’s the sleeping Indian,” Ed, our pilot, told us, gesturing to the Rocky Mountains and gently rotating the balloon so we could all get a look. There were eight passengers in the basket, pressed neatly together with just enough room for each of us to have a view of the land spread out beneath us. Our balloon led the way, followed by two other Fair Winds balloons across a large lake and a road where excited school children waved to us from the windows of their yellow school bus.

The balloon flight was a highlight in a week full of astonishing experiences, from exploring beautiful down town Denver to meandering around the remarkable rock formations of the Garden of the Gods. But today my husband James and cousin Ian had something less cerebral in mind. As soon as the balloon touched down in a field of prairie dogs and we’d helped to fold the immense swathes of fabric away into the balloon envelope, Ian drove us to nearby Fort Mason and the Odell Brewing Company.

If you’ve always dismissed American beers as weak and watery, as I have, then you’ve clearly missed the recent beer revolution. Micro breweries have sprung up across the country, with many clustered around cities such as Seattle and Denver, and Odells is one of the best. We arrived in time to work our way through a sampler of their most popular lines, from the dark malty whatever to the crisp wheat beer. It was enough to whet our appetite for the tour past sweet smelling barrels of fermenting hops, through to the gleaming, noisy bottling room.

At the end of the tour, our guide, fresh from a trip to UK breweries courtesy of the company, mentioned a limited addition beer sold in champagne bottles in a few of the nearby liquor stores, and we set off on a mission to find and buy one. That evening at my cousin’s house in Parker we popped the cork and my husband poured us each a frothing glass of the legendary beer. I took my first sip and grimaced. It tasted of fizzy marmite. The boys, however, were gleefully knocking theirs back, and I realised, like marmite, you either love it or hate it.

Likewise, Colorado is a state of extremes, from the flat prairies to the reaching mountains, sophisticated cities to rawest nature, from the heat of the sun to the chill of snowfall. In one day we experienced every various of the weather, setting off with air conditioning turned up high as we drove to the Rocky Mountain’s national park.

Colorado is one of North America’s highest states, and Parker is set 6,000 feet above sea level, which is one of the reasons why you have to be wary of the sun here. Before long, we reached Este National Park, passing the iconic hotel where the Steven King film the Shining was filmed.

As we continued, buildings became sparser, and it was clear that with one heavy snowfall these homes would be isolated. As we wound our way up the narrow mountain roads, rain, then sleet, began to fall, making our route more treacherous.

By the time we stopped for lunch, snow was falling and I was glad to borrow an oversized fleece from my cousin. In Colorado, residents know to travel with clothing for all eventualities. Lightning flickered on the horizon and Pikas, furry critters like sprightly guinea pigs, leapt about the slopes calling to one another in anxious shrieks.

Our aim was to catch sight of the majestic elks that roamed these mountains, but the Pikas and a few hopefully begging chipmunks were the only beasties in sight. Then at the visitors centre standing at an altitude of 11,000 feet, I noticed a gaggle of tourists looking out of one of the windows at a herd of distant beige and brown blobs, which they assured me were elk. Satisfied with that glimpse, we headed back to the car and drove down to the town beyond the national park.

And it was here that we saw the elk in their full glory. Congregated on a patch of grass, undeterred by the camera-wielding humans gathered around them, a group of glossy, beautiful elk feasted on the grass while the splendidly horned stag sat in their midst, carefully watching over his harem. As we dove on we passed a stream where a single young male elk stood in the rushing waters and nibbled from the leaves of an overhanging tree, no doubt the reason for the older stag’s wariness.

“Well, who knew they were so intelligent,” my cousin exclaimed as he turned onto the freeway.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He laughed, “Hunting season just began. Those elk are, quite literally, fair game. Just about the only place they can’t be shot is within the town.”

For me this summed up the appeal of Colorado, where wilderness and civilisation lie side by side, often with only a stretch of tarmac to separate them, and sometimes not even that.

© J Darley

This time last year I was in Colorado, one of the most beautiful states I’ve visited.  My husband and I were coming to the end of a trip that had included San Diego and Seattle, plus the airport, but none of the fun bits, of San Francisco.

The novel I’m writing at the moment has some significant scenes set in Colorado, which has given me the delicious pleasure of revisiting it in my imagination. It’s one of the reasons I became a travel writer - you get to travel, and then, each time you write a feature about a place, you get the sense of going back there. The fact that this has now crossed over into my creative writing is particularly gorgeous.

Dark things happen to my characters in the chapters set in a spectacular Colorado site named Garden of the Gods. Being able to make these incidents unfold against a backdrop of crimson sandstone and bright blue skies gives them a vibrancy that simply wouldn’t have had the same impact against, say, the grey, grey skies of Bristol.

Not that the skies have been so grey recently. In fact, this September has offered better weather than August has for several years, with glowing, balmy days that fill the parks with excitable families while us unencumbered folk swarm pub-gardens where we can soak up the sun along with a few drinks. These are the kind of days that gild each view, with light so pure that buildings embedded in a hillside over a mile in the distance stand out with such definition they could be a few metres away. It’s the kind of glorious light that makes me recall Colorado, which has made writing these passages that bit easier.

© Michal Zacharzewski

It never ceases to amaze me how many fascinating people there are out there with a common goal of sharing their writing with as many readers as possible. I’ve come to know a huge number of interesting people through being the editor of EssentialWriters.com. Often I contact writers, editors, literary agents and publishers to be featured on the site, other times they contact me. The latter is the most exciting, especially when they simply get in touch because they stumbled across EssentialWriters.com or came to the site via a recommendation and and want to let me know they liked what they saw. It gives me a little flicker of joy deep inside.

A writer’s life is full of challenges, so I cherish these small triumphs - I feel like I’ve reached out, communicated something, and surely that’s the drive that motivates us to write.

Being rejected is part of the writer’s job as well, and sometimes the most disheartening thing in the world is a fat brown envelope falling through my letterbox, addressed to me in my own handwriting. And sometimes that makes me want to stop sending things out, to leave my work lounging on my laptop’s hard drive for evermore.

Then I interview an author, poet or journalist who shares their methods for dealing with rejection, for maintaining their motivation, for getting published. Their answers never fail to give me a bit of a boost - more often than not it’s about persistence, about reviewing each piece rejection, making use of any feedback, strengthening, tightening, and getting it back out there to try again.

They remind me that though my submissions may or may not get published second, third or fourth time around, one thing is certain - my work won’t have a chance of being published if it stays on my computer.

And on the occasions when a piece does get accepted, it encourages me that all the hard work, all the revisions are improving my fiction and features. And that’s the best any writer can hope for - to continually improve.

© Elke Rohn

At this time of year, when golden mornings are crisply cold and the sun slowly powers up to reach full force by midday, I’m reminded of every autumn I experienced as a child. While some were wetter than others, and many more grey than gold, all held the dread of the return to school and the promise of conkers.

Conkers, with their prickly green jackets giving way to a soft white interior cradling the glossy, glowing brown nut.

This fruit of the horse chestnut tree is inedible for humans, but hunger wasn’t behind those searches through the fallen leaves. It was about gathering weapons in preparation of a war, or collecting jewels to hoard. It was about the simple pleasure of bringing one of the most beautiful symbols of autumn inside.

I spent two weeks of September 2003 in Portland, Oregon, and discovered that this fascination with conkers is unique to the Brits. The Americans I was staying with had never even heard the word before.

Although their streets were lined with horse chestnut trees, the children in this neighbourhood left the fallen bounty to lie in the road, being transformed to a golden slick that grew wider with each passing car.

Trying to explain my passion for them, I gathered dozens and peeled off their prickles, pour them into clear glass vases and placed them on windowsills where the sun could best showcase their opulent sheen.

My hosts smiled politely, waited until I turned away, and promptly discarded all the fruits of my labour, aptly demonstrating that my treasure was their trash - eccentric Brit that I am.

My father the Storyteller

Last Sunday I went on a storywalk with my dad, Philip Darley, and his partner in crime, Jerry Dicker. The pair of them have been collaborating on all kinds of eccentric endeavours for longer than I can remember. When you’re a child you take your parents’ activities for granted - it’s only when other people react with surprise that you have a father who dresses up and does ‘skits’ that you realise it’s anything unusual.

Since retiring five years ago my dad has been exploring all kinds of outlets for his creativity, from singing in a choir to fully engaging in storytelling, a hugely popular movement with festivals, courses and a loyal following.

Storytellers, from what he tells me, falls into two distinct camps - those who write their stories down and then read them aloud and those who honour the oral tradition of our ancestors by sharing the story as they remember it, not word for word but free to evolve a little with each telling.

Jerry and Philip call themselves Bags of Stories and each tell the stories that they’ve found, overheard or made up. Sometimes they’re hired for birthday parties, fundraising events, Halloween celebrations and once a local prison invited them in, with a strict list of what they could and could not mention (no violence, so salacious material, no deaths…).

The stories are always intended for adults, because, as my dad says, it’s us grown ups who need to be told stories. “On a very basic level, going to a storytelling revives the safe, cosy feelings we had when being read to as children. When I took up storytelling, a lot of people assumed I would be telling them to children, but I feel that children get plenty of this - it’s adults who miss out. Something within us yearns deeply to be told stories.”

The annual storywalks are something slightly different, as they decide on a location and then explore it together, picking out stories that will suit the environment and features of the landscape they’re walking through. Last Sunday, 16 of us met in the grounds of Berkeley Castle, Gloucestershire, and set off through the medieval deer park, pausing when I spotted a herd of red deer so my dad could tell a Grimm’s fairy tale about a boy being transformed into a deer by a magic spell.

Later in the walk we halted by the park’s folly, a beautiful tower, and Jerry told a rather lovely version of Repunzel in which the maiden ends up floating off down the Little River Avon and the wicked enchantress is left locked in the tower.

It was a gorgeous walk, transformed by the stories into a place of magic and possibilities, and seeing the occasional group of red and fallow deer only added to the sense of wonder.

© SXC.hu

I have a new approach to short story writing that I’m using to transform some of my woollier, waftier work. It’s very simple really. Basically I finish writing the tale, tidy it up, walk away for a while, and when I return I rip out the first paragraph in its entirety.

It’s rather brutal, but leaves behind something raw and bright, more vivid than the first draft.

It’s like breaking away the rough covering of some tropical fruit to reveal the tender, nutritious flesh within. Sometimes I find I need to sprinkle in a new sentence or two to explain what’s going on, but more often than not it stand strong enough alone, leaving the readers feasting on the luscious fruit at the centre of the tale within the first few words.

It’s a trick that I’ve taken a long time to warm to - at first it felt far too dangerous to remove the buffer of those initial sentences. But not I find I’m addicted to the process, wanting to trim and shed words relentlessly, a urge I have to keep in check so I don’t end up with a beginning and end within a single sentence or find myself writing an entire novel with no words at all, just punctuation; no fruit, only juice…

That said, it’s an immensely satisfying game, and one that I’m hoping is improving my work edit by edit, cut by cut, as I pare down the layers until the light shines right through.