It’s a matter of nature and nurture. I’ve always loved the rhythm of the changing seasons through the year. We all rejoice at the first buds of spring, and feel the melancholy of autumn’s falling leaves. There is a narrative pattern to this and I’ve long believed that storytelling is influenced at the deepest level inside us by our relationship with the seasons. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” wrote Shakespeare. At university I was persuaded by the literary theories of the Canadian critic Northrop Frye (“the archetypes of mythology”) which were built around the way seasonal narrative is ingrained in us.
It’s not a religion. It’s more than just symbolism. But I find it still influences me – and I suspect all of us – every day as I wake up to find the morning bright or icy or rainy or dark.
Dark Angels was an idea that came out of this thinking. First a book, then a series of courses to help people become better writers. www.dark-angels.org.uk With Stuart Delves and Jamie Jauncey I’ve run these for nine years now. They’ve developed their own annual and seasonal pattern.
A few weeks ago we met in Edinburgh to plan the year’s programme. We meet for that purpose at the year’s dark nadir. We’re in hibernation. It never seems right to hold a Dark Angels course in winter. Why? I think it’s because Dark Angels is based on an optimistic belief in human creativity, in the transformative power of writing. We need spring to give the first evidence of this.
So this year our first course is at the end of March in remotest Northumbria at Highgreen. The signs of spring in the landscape and in our writing will be eagerly awaited. Then in midsummer we’ll run a course at Ty Newydd on the edge of Snowdonia, followed by another six weeks later at Sigtuna in Sweden. I’m looking forward to the effect of long hours of Scandinavian daylight.
In late summer, early autumn, we’ll be back to Andalucia to taste the fruits of another country and culture. We’ll round off the year in the Scottish highlands at Moniack Mhor, with big skies and windswept hills just dusted with snow.
And this year there’s a Dark Angels addition to the calendar. In Oxford, starting on May Day, there will be an exhibition called “Other Worlds”. More than twenty creative pairs, writers and visual artists, are collaborating to fill the rooms of the Story Museum with installations about storytelling. I’m collaborating with Anita Klein, and I’ve written a story about the annual natural cycle. Anita is going to paint an arched entranceway with angels as her response – here’s one of her initial sketches. My story closes with a last line that says: “And so began again the cycle of the year, with its story, and with it all the stories.” 
For 26 Treasures the book, go to www.unbound.co.uk/books/26-treasures
