fiction and creative non-fiction from brennan quenneville
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 [...]
Having loosed a monster that he does not understand and which threatens to destroy him, Ged spends much of A Wizard of Earthsea running. The titular wizard's constant flight eventually leaves him wholly exhausted and on the brink of annihilation, at which point he returns to the mage who was his first master, Ogion. Under [...]
Deep in an ancestral crypt, a group of wizards gathers to uncover a nefarious plot. That sounds like an exciting premise, right? Spooky and mysterious and full of ambiguous power. Except that when that exact scenario unfolds in the latter half of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, it falls completely flat. There are a [...]
When asked to describe what kind of music his band plays, Andy Dwyer—the kindhearted lug played by Chris Pratt on Parks and Recreation—states that he "doesn't like to define" their sound but that they sound like Matchbox 20 and The Fray. "So ... rock," someone responds. "Well, again," explains Andy, "I don't really like to [...]
In his short story “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” Jorge Luis Borges—that miraculous, mind-fucking Argentinian—proposes an unusual premise. The titular Menard is shown to be obsessed with unusual literary feats and, as such, he decides to take it upon himself to rewrite Cervantes' classic, Don Quixote. He's not planning to translate the book or [...]
Ursula K. Le Guin, my hero, died on a Monday. On the Wednesday that preceded her passing, only five days before her death, I sent her the only piece of fan mail I've ever written. In it, I struggled to contain and express the boundless praise and thanks due to a woman who, despite our [...]
(SPOILER ALERT. This post, written after only one viewing of The Last Jedi, is absolutely spoilerific. I'm going to ruin the movie for you if you haven't already seen it, is I guess what I'm saying. Continue at your own discretion.) As The Force Awakens drew to a close, Rey stood atop the scenic island [...]
A decade ago I sat in a collegiate music composition class and listened to a professor explain how, in order to write a truly great song, it was necessary to hone an idea over and over, fully exploring it and discovering the best way to implement it. Young people, he posited, struggled with this because [...]
