fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
I want to like Sideways, I really do. Alexander Payne's 2004 film, which tracks Paul Giamatti's Miles and Thomas Haden Church's Jack across a bachelor party tour of California wine country, spends much of its runtime celebrating writing and creation. It's just the kind of movie someone who writes a blog that is partially about [...]
As I write this I've just finished reading Volume Three of the incredible Saga series of comics by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. From the opening page of Volume One, I've been completely enthralled with Saga and yet I haven't so much as considered writing about the series or, if I did, what I [...]
A writer's creative space is sacred, or at least that's the impression that everyone on the internet wants you to have. And, in fairness, they're not necessarily wrong. Every writer I know, along with the graphic designers, musicians and creators of whatever else, has a favorite place to settle in and get to the messy [...]
Rocannon's World may not be one of the first dozen Ursula K. Le Guin books that I'd recommend but the novel did birth a legacy that, rather appropriately, stretches through time from the story's 1966 publication through the present day. Needing a means of communication that could bridge the time-dilation gap of faster than light [...]
Spoiler Alert! This post discusses key plot points of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order. In the middle act of Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, Greez—a squat, four-armed pilot who functions as the game's primary comedic relief—sits down with Cal Kestis, the player character, and has a serious conversation. In the moments leading up to that [...]
The year is drawing to a close and taking the decade with it (because, for some reason, we use zero-based numbering for that kind of thing). That means that we're approaching list season, when every denizen of the internet will bombard the digital void with lists of movies, albums, books and whatever else they have [...]
Yesterday I posted an article that compared Veronica Mars, The Postal Service's Give Up and Kenna's New Sacred Cow in a discussion of how our perceptions don't always match reality. The article was fun to write and was based on an idea that I had had a few years ago but never finished, that original [...]
During the four weeks that We Almost Had It was being serially posted, I started working on a new short story, this one inspired by the A Lot Like Birds song "Atoms in Evening." It took me a few days to pin down the exact story I wanted to tell but, once I locked onto [...]
As you might have noticed, this site's name and web address have changed. Gone is the bold, all-caps version of my name that used to adorn the homepage and in its place is a new title: Songs & Stories. It's a name that seems to sum up what this place really focuses on and what [...]
Over the past six months, I've posted two new articles on this site every week (save holidays) and, barring a few digressions into other topics, they've mostly alternated between discussing music and books. (Sometimes both.) But over the next month, things are going to be a little bit different. Sticking to my two-posts-per-week schedule, I'm [...]
