fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
One of the presents that my wife and I received after our wedding was a Vera Wang crystal bowl. It's a striking piece but given that we've lived in a small bungalow with tight hallways and crowded rooms for the entire five years that we've been married, there was no place to put such a [...]
An Air Gradia jetliner rolls slowly down the tarmac at a crowded airport, past the teeming gates and packed terminals. It weaves a careful path to the farthest reach of the concrete, to the most isolated location possible, before it comes to a stop. Its doors never open. Of the many indelible images of Emily [...]
At the north end of downtown Ann Arbor, sitting on Main Street between a coffee shop and a catering company, there's a German-themed restaurant called Heidelberg. The first floor features a traditional dining room while the basement is a rathskeller where you'll find a bunch of twenty-somethings trying to drink das boot. Above both of [...]
This post contains spoilers for If You Come Softly that cover the book's climactic moments. If you don't want the story ruined for you, bookmark this page and come back once you've finished the book. Happy reading. Jacqueline Woodson's 1998 YA novel If You Come Softly is slim but cutting and every bit as relevant [...]
What do a fuzzy indie band, experimental rock revivalists and one of the biggest pop stars on the planet have in common? That they began their careers with short releases that left me desperately wanting more. Unfortunately for me, only the pop star managed to release additional work while the other two bands faded into [...]
You've most likely never heard of Dell Glover but, if you're anything like me, he had a large impact on your holiday season whether you knew it or not. Being a compulsive audiophile who grew up in the '90s, I have amassed a massive number of compact discs and a substantial portion of those CDs [...]
Because I had planned poorly, the Vek—burrowing, alien kaiju—came swarming out of the dirt. The war was over, I had lost. With Earth thoroughly doomed, I took my one surviving pilot and abandoned the timeline, jumping through a rift in time and hoping to do better in an alternate universe. That sequence, on loop, is the [...]
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 [...]
Earlier this year I sent a song recommendation to my dad. "This one is slow and plodding," I said. "It's got a strange beauty." If those cryptic descriptions make it seem like an odd recommendation to make, I assure you that it was not. I grew up in a musical house. While my mom was [...]
It's one of the most famous moments in syndicated Christmas special history. Linus, wearing a green beanie and carrying his trustworthy blue blanket, steps to the front of the stage in an empty auditorium. A single spotlight illuminates him as he recites scripture from memory, describing to his best friend, the constantly beleaguered Charlie Brown, [...]
Songs & Stories 