fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
She was born on a Monday in October. The weekend before had been bright and unseasonably warm and utterly heartbreaking. We carried our grief into the hospital, where our days and nights decomposed into the two-hour cycles of our newborn daughter. Each time a nurse or doctor came into our room, which was often, we strapped [...]
"I did something bad," she said. Inspired by a workplace speaker, Caitlin had been browsing rescue sites before I got home from work. For months we had been talking about getting a dog but we worried that we weren't ready. Now the search had begun and there were three pups pulling on her heartstrings. She [...]
2020 has been a, um, challenging year. There was the massive wildfire that destroyed lives, reshaped entire biospheres and underscored the urgency of addressing climate change at every level, as soon as possible. No, not that wildfire, the other one. There were protests against the racial injustice that is baked into American life, a widespread [...]
There's a little drive-in restaurant in Walled Lake that sits right on the water. I'll always remember it as an A&W but Google informs me that, in a change that I can hazily recall, it briefly shed its corporate parentage and became Tom's Root Beer Stand before closing its doors for good. Every year, after [...]
Over the weekend I traveled to Chicago with my friends Matt and Brenda in order to attended all three days of the Riot Fest music festival. The whole weekend, held in the Windy City's Humboldt Park, was a strangely segmented affair and trying to turn all of my thoughts from it into one cohesive piece seems not only painfully [...]
While we're on the subject of my sister's bizarro gifts, and since I've only recently recovered from a bit of a cold, I think it's time that I tell the tale of the Curse of Pocahonto. Like many of my strange childhood stories, this one begins on a No Moms Allowed camping trip. In this particular instance we were [...]
My sister, Michelle, and I have a long-standing tradition: whenever either of us goes on a vacation, we bring the other back the most grotesque, cringe-worthy (or at least stupid) gift that we can find. This hallowed practice actually began some fifteen years ago when, on a family vacation with our parents, Michelle and I [...]
I've mentioned before that our oldest dog, Elly, is something of a terror. She's escaped from fenced yards, run through the house with a knife in her mouth (blade-side out), and eaten enough random detritus that her accrued medical bills probably could have sent Caitlin and I on a rather enjoyable vacation. For all of that, [...]
It started as a daddy-daughter camping trip back in 1990. My Uncle Jeff and two of his best friends - who had spent a sizable chunk of their younger years hiking and backpacking and camping - took their daughters to a campground on a small inland lake and spent a few days eating and drinking [...]
Caitlin and I got our first dog, Elly, almost four and a half years ago. Shortly after that - once we had gotten accustomed to the daily trauma that was being Elly's parents - we realized that we actually wanted to have two dogs. Concerns about space, apartment rentals, and money kept us from growing [...]
Songs & Stories 