fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
"As long ago as forever, as far away as Selidor..." It's fitting that Ursula K. Le Guin's The Farthest Shore has its own vernacular for "once upon a time" because, of all of Le Guin's heroic tales, The Farthest Shore is perhaps the most archetypal. The story traces the arc of young Arren, a rural [...]
Worldbuilding is exhausting. It requires a massive amount of mental energy to imagine and then codify an entirely new world with all its nooks and crannies, its politics and customs. To expedite this process, many works of fantasy rely on familiar tropes as a shortcut, allowing vast institutions to be explained away by a few [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Spells and enchantments are enticing to writers because they suggest that words - the writer's most beloved commodity - have power and value beyond what simply appears on the page. And in 1968 Ursula LeGuin incorporated the similarities between writing and magic into her masterful bildungsroman A Wizard of Earthsea. Long before Harry Potter, A Wizard of Earthsea is the [...]
Songs & Stories 