TAKING early retirement to care for her mother has seen Suzanne Jeans embark on a new dramatic chapter in her life.

Suzanne, 57, from Knutsford, took early retirement from teaching 18 months ago to help care for her mum Jackie, 84, who has Alzheimer’s Disease.

Jackie lives on the Wirral, and Suzanne commutes two to three days a week to help care for her.

A year ago Suzanne joined the Manchester Irish Writers group, and with its encouragement began to write a short story, The Whiteout.

Suzanne said: “Four thousand words later it was completed, and then began the process of sending it to publishers and entering competitions.

“Last month I received the news that my story had been chosen for publication by Audio Arcadia. I am delighted and proud that my first foray into writing fiction has been published.

“I am now putting the final touches to a play script which is semi-autobiographical, dealing with mother-daughter relationships in the context of caring for a parent with dementia.

“Last weekend I was invited to present a rehearsed reading of the first six scenes at the Liverpool Everyman Theatre as part of their monthly ‘Scratch’ morning events.”

Suzanne entered an abridged version of the play, An Absence Of, in the Arundel Festival Theatre Trail Writers Competition, and it was one of seven plays to be chosen to be performed in August in Arundel.

She hopes to enter the full-length play in The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting, the UK’s largest playwriting competition and a partnership between the Royal Exchange Theatre and property company Bruntwood.

Suzanne was one of seven authors who won Audio Arcadia’s General Fiction short story competition, with The Whiteout included in Audio Arcadia’s latest paperback, An Eclectic Mix, Volume Eight.

The story is about Annie, a creature of habit, settled, steady. A mile away Roy, retired and quietly contented, fills his long days in his garden.

It is New Year’s Eve and the snow is falling, but Annie is not alone; something inside her has begun to unravel.

Suzanne said: “I have been working on a playscript for the last 12 months, and the character of Annie appears in two scenes.

“One freezing day in November I was musing over the character and discussing her development with my youngest daughter.

“Annie deserved a story all to herself, so I began jotting ideas down the next day, but then ran out of steam.

“A couple of days later as I was walking across my frozen lawn, into my mind popped an image of a body buried beneath a surface of snow.

“On the spot I created the plotline for Annie, and wanted a counterpoint of ‘normality’, hence the character of Roy.

“As a result, from the original playscript, which has been chosen to appear at the Arundel Theatre Trail festival, emerged my short story ‘The Whiteout’.”

Suzanne worked for more than 30 years teaching drama and theatre before setting up and managing a library in an 11 to 16-age school.