fiction and creative non-fiction from Brennan Quenneville
Tehanu, the fourth entry in Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea Cycle, is difficult and, much as it pains me to say this about anything Le Guin wrote, often unenjoyable. Trading in the adventure and excitement of its predecessors, Tehanu focuses not on large-scale, world-altering conflicts but instead on the small, mundane acts that shape a [...]
"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 [...]
Songs & Stories 