The Dawning by Megan Taylor

One of the immediately striking things about The Dawning (by Megan Taylor) is its present tense narrative, naturally enforcing the frenetic pace of the story and leading the reader into the unknown along with the narrators.

Set in a wintry backdrop of the Peaks, on New Year’s Eve, it tells the story of the Haywood family, who, one by one are inwardly crumbling with the pressure of family and their own lives. With great insight, Taylor weaves the multiple perspectives of each member, meticulously, and so creates a fuller picture of the level of disconnection found within this particular family, and with each reader will identify and empathise:

Stella, the mother with young baby Mia, suffering from post-natal depression. Philip, the father – at the cusp of a mid-life crisis, looking for pleasure elsewhere with tragi-comic results. Nicola – the teenage daughter, shy, unsure, lacking-in-confidence desperately trying to fit in and emulate her more glamorous friend, Christine. And 11-year-old Zac, in some ways the most sensible of the lot, acutely aware of his family falling to pieces and in his own child-like, protective way fighting against this.

This multiple perspective has echoes of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, where we get to know each character a lot more intimately, than if it was a simple, straightforward narrative. It also alerts us to the unreliability of the narrators. On the one hand, by Stella’s account, we see Nicola as a beautiful, young teenager. Nicola disagrees, in a heart-wrenching but typically teenage body-dysmorphic way. In her descriptions of herself she is ‘dowdy’, ‘more like a fishwife’ and with ‘clothes […] safe and uninspired’.

Taylor’s unravelling story is so compelling, because we are left, on cliff-hangers constantly catching up with the characters own moral dilemmas in the backdrop of a claustrophobic home, a sophisticated party, a teenage-get together in the woods. We don’t know and we want to know. The Dawning has cinematic overtones – not only in its suspense, but the sheer quality of the pictures it creates:

‘Yapping and growling, the animals’ dark, glistening bodies had tumbled over and into one another as they reeled and snapped against her legs. For a moment, they had seemed more like giant rats than dogs, like nightmare creatures – or pieces of the night itself…’

I read The Dawning in one sitting. It wouldn’t surprise me if you did too.

The Dawning by Megan Taylor is published by Weathervane Press. Megan’s blog is at http://megantaylorblogstories.blogspot.com

Long Discarded

This image is from a short story I wrote and illustrated (with photos) a while ago. I'm hoping to make it into a few books and sell them at some point.

Fog, Extending

Fog, Extending

I. Victoria Park, WA4

Empty pavement
finds you walking on it.
The shape of an unlit
streetlight guides you,

brown railings separate
you from the weir.
Turning, two lone
green benches greet you,

above, the trees stark
against Hokusai sky.
Unseen waters
tumble, and

G
I
N
G
E
!

cries a railing.

Dog walkers enter and
fade into the trees,
characters in an
absurdist play.

Sign, yellow spells:

DANGER!
Risk of Falling
Risk of Drowning.

You feel at home
in nothing places.

II. Birmingham New St

I held on to you like the empty bottles
and wrappers you wish to discard
on a long train journey
with many changes.

III. Montserrat, Spain

Things emerge.

Autumnal branches.
Montserrat’s high arches,
Its Daliesque peaks.

The bells shatter the
bone-creaking ground.

An old man stands
a few feet from
the guided tour.

Dignified,
this bulgy Bill Murray,
wears his shorts
his yellow polo
his hat
a Disney princess bag

despite the cold
the rain.


IV. Victoria Park, WA4

I sit on a bench.

Traffic and voices
dissolve into the distance.

One tree towers with
drooping branches.

The day hides its scattered clouds.

Chopped tree trunks protrude from the short grass;
guests that won’t leave a finished party.

A cyclist flies circling the rose bushes.

I could be anywhere. This comforts me.
I could be anywhere. This saddens me.

_--
E Regan

Writing Sessions

Hey!

Nice one for joining me, Kate & Claire! Maybe you can make me look less sad by posting comments when I post a poem or story! ; )

Look fwd to interacting here. x

Is life absurd?

I was asked this question at 18. I answered ‘NOOOOOooooooooooo’ with all my might. I answered it in the form of a 1st year Philosophy essay to be handed in and marked. I remember the mark. 67. I think the PhD student marking it was just pleased to see something other than a screaming ‘YEEEEEeeeeeeees’ in the pile. My ‘NOOOOOOOOOoooooooo’ might have been entirely inarticulate, but as a ‘No’ it stood out.

I remember the only guy I liked in the ‘Yes’ pile was Camus. Because Camus, even though a firm believer in the banality and absurdity of life, was an advocator of raging against this meaninglessness with fury. Even though I was still in the ‘No’ pile, I liked his rebellion. It was very teenage-like and passionate, and Lord knows I respected intensity back then.

I quoted not just philosophers, but musicians, artists… and the whole theme of absurdity being reaffirmed in popular culture although still fumed in disagreement. ‘We sit here stranded though we’re all doing our best to deny it’- I quoted Dylan.

Now, life seems reasonably absurd. Arbitrary. Ridiculous. Silly. Laughable. Although maybe this is not as terrifying a prospect as I once thought, and to think that was what made me cling so fiercely to my unusual ‘No’.

I haven’t been in work/study since February 2009. I’ve had 7 interviews in the past few months (none since July) and in every one I wanted to get up and do a bit of a jig, and say ‘Why the farce? I’ll do whatever you want… I’ll sing, I’ll go get you a coffee, I’ll shear your pet goat… just don’t let me go through the farce of this bloody interview!’… because you’re asked questions that seem to require some sort of prodigious power to answer them… and then you happen to talk to someone who got the post or who works at the same place in a similar role, and their answers they gave are blindingly obvious and not very dissimilar to the ones you gave.

Life does seem pretty vacant without some sort of definite structure. I’m not asking for any God-like totality or crystal-clear profundity, just some sort of vague job that will be as absurd as the next but with some sort of activity to make it allusively appropriate to my somewhat creative persona.

Although my answer now belongs begrudgingly to the ‘Yes’ bloc, I’m sort of glad I was once adolescently entrenched in the ‘No’ camp. Camp Nou.

A3 Posters For Sale

Got some photographs to sell in the form of posters, this time!

1 for £8

2 for £15

These are just 2 of many designs. Send me a message at ereganphoto@gmail.com if you'd like to order one, or ask me to show you more samples of my work so you can choose an image yourself!

Xmas Cards For Sale

available from me at ereganphoto@gmail.com
packs of 6 for £4

2 packs of 6 for £7

non-start

Not written here for a while.

Great start.

I have been writing (this is said with a big pinch of defensiveness) although I confess I’ve probably spent more time watching Jeremy Kyle re-runs than writing. (I wish I was Larry David. Then and only then, would the words ‘you don’t know me’ theatrically repeated from the settee resound with humour, and not bastard boredom).

I’ve been writing poetry about photography.

Tried to write a review about ‘Hunger’ and the unending, piss puddles from the cells lining the Maze’s corridor while reflecting the institutional lights. I can’t quite seem to gather all my disparate thoughts about the film into a good enough sequence.

I’ve tried writing a piece ‘9 ways to plunge further into credit crunch blues’, although maybe it should be renamed ‘once a pauper, always a pauper’ because it’s not like I’m losing my house or job. I don’t own a house or have a job.

I wanted to write a review of the Manchester Carols. I wrote a few bits and pieces on scraps of paper on the train home, but discarded it. I seem to discard a lot of pieces of paper this day. Probably should put them in that blue bin. Never been good at recycling.

I need to write an essay for uni about Berryman and Williams. I don’t know enough about poetic personae. I’m excited to learn about it. So much so, I was reading on the train home semi-relevant essays about Williams and Berryman. This guy next to me, slightly pissed, kept looking at me reading. He finally says 5 minutes before he gets off : ‘is that any good, or do you have to read it?’ Before I’ve spoken he decides ‘It’s boring, innit.’ I say ‘actually, no. I sort of like it. Bit of a geek’. He rants platitudes about life being about getting from ‘A to B’ and ‘you have to know what you want to do’ and just when I’m beginning to nod off, he supplies me with this corker ‘tv’s the killer though. You shouldn’t watch tv’. How does he know? So, maybe he was infinitely more perceptive than his white chavvy ku klux klan type hoodie and his approaching middle age goatee led me to believe. He knows I’m watching too much tv. I can compare myself to Mildred in Ray Bradbury’s ‘Fahrenheit 451’ with her 3 interactive walls of tv, if it makes me feel better. Or LD. But I know it’s not like that.

Laura Marling- Rambling Man

Watch & tremble: