Notebook
The Real and the Imagined
Hardcover Trilogy Edition
December 1, 2026
Love under a big moon.
That is how I came to understand what it was I was writing with each of the three books that form the trilogy, The Real and the Imagined. I promised myself that once they were completed, I would get that tattoo. And today, I have it. Just above my left thumb, where I can see it as I continue exploring this thing called writing.
Fractured identities, moving through fractured landscapes.
And yet, what was real? What was imagined? And where do those boundaries begin to blur?
For the longest time I couldn’t write directly about certain emotional realities in life. And so I found fiction. Or more accurately, fiction found me.
Realism, at least as a strict retelling, often feels like a false witness. Memory shifts. Context changes. Time alters meaning. We reconstruct ourselves endlessly through perspective and emotion, trying to impose coherence on lives that rarely are coherent. As Marie Howe wrote: “Memory is a poet, not a historian.”
Fiction, for me, became a way of sidestepping the limitations of fixed perspective and rational explanation. Not to escape truth, but to move closer to it. “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” — Albert Camus
When I came back to writing fiction after years spent directing and producing, I began by revisiting a screenplay I had written years earlier called Urram Hill, which would eventually become the novel The Fiddler in the Night. While working on it, however, other stories began appearing unexpectedly, insisting on being written. I would leave the novel, write one or two stories, then find myself pulled elsewhere again by another voice or image emerging unexpectedly.
Without fully understanding it at the time, I had begun writing all three books simultaneously — The Fiddler in the Night, One Violent Day: LOVE, GUNS & GOD in America, and the stories that would become Torrents of Our Time.
Each book became an exploration of people attempting to navigate fractured worlds while searching for meaning, connection, identity, grace, and love beneath increasingly unstable realities. Be those, real or imagined.
This December 1, 2026, for the first time, the trilogy will be released together in a single hardcover volume collecting the revised second editions of all three books.
The revisions themselves became part of the larger journey. Entire passages rewritten. Rhythms altered. Excess stripped away. The work gradually moved toward something less interested in explanation and more interested in essence.
It was during this revision process that I came to understand I had not been writing about my children and what we had gone through together.
I had been writing the books for them.
With the completion of the revised second edition of One Violent Day, the cover for The Real and the Imagined has now also taken shape, the trilogy finally gathered together in a single volume, bringing me, after all of this time, much joy and gratitude.
Torrents of Our Time
A collection of literary stories exploring memory, longing, isolation, mortality, and emotional fracture through multiple voices and perspectives.
Kirkus Reviews wrote:
“Many of Fennell’s stories, which employ different narrative techniques, create effective tension and suspense.”
The Fiddler in the Night
Part coming-of-age novel, part fever dream, The Fiddler in the Night explores memory, violence, innocence, and the unstable boundaries between perception and reality.
The US Review of Books wrote:
“In essence, the author has created a work of art in word form.”
And Booklife Reviews noted:
“This dark coming-of-age story will impress readers with its distinctive writing and intense, at times violent, story.”
One Violent Day: LOVE, GUNS & GOD in America
Revised Second Edition — September 2026
One Violent Day: LOVE, GUNS & GOD in America follows a series of interconnected lives moving toward a single violent event that will alter them forever. The novel explores the collision between intimacy and violence, myth and reality, faith and identity in contemporary America.
Literary in voice yet strongly narrative in structure, the novel blends emotional realism with mythic undertones and cinematic scope.
- Midwest Book Review wrote:
"Christian Fennell's novel presents a vivid, soul-searching account of life and death in America."
Ekphrastic Energy
Does this happen to you? Unexpectedly, an image, or a turn of phrase you catch somewhere, will, for whatever reason, spark something authentic. I suppose that’s the best way to say it.
What do you see? And from there, words on a page. This fascinates me. Each of us reaching to a certain process. Vision. What matters. Why. How we explore that with words. The very limitations of the form, in turn, making us better writers. And yet, the need to reach more; seek more, remains. And on we go, trying to understand ourselves; our loved ones; the world itself, in the here and now, and yesterday, too.
And in the quiet moments of a day, during all of this, I have to keep reminding myself: the reaching is the thing itself.
Because it's true, and it's necessary.
Have a good weekend.
Why Issue 2nd Editions?
Why these 2nd editions of all three books of my trilogy, The Real and the
Imagined? I seemed to have always understood I would do this, even while writing the 1st editions. Why? I don't know. Process? Evolution of a writer? Something like that. In 2014, when I returned to writing after a long break from it - decades, first spending time as a director, mostly commercials, which I loved, and then later as a producer, which I really did not love, I started exploring narrative fiction with the writing of my novel The Fiddler in the Night. It had been a screenplay - Urram Hill, my first, that I had written in my twenties when I began to explore merging my love of writing with filmmaking.
Queen Street West, Toronto, mid-eighties, a crazy, brilliant time and place that I am grateful to have been a part of. Fertile, and inspiring, Toronto coming of age in the arts. Who wasn't there? 2 a.m. at the Cameron House? Sunday afternoons at the Black Bull? Backstage at the Rivoli? Upstairs at the Senator? Stumbling happily, pretty much everywhere, and through everything, while discovering art, and ourselves along with it.
Queen Street West, Toronto, mid-eighties, a crazy, brilliant time and place that I am grateful to have been a part of. Fertile, and inspiring, Toronto coming of age in the arts. Who wasn't there? 2 a.m. at the Cameron House? Sunday afternoons at the Black Bull? Backstage at the Rivoli? Upstairs at the Senator? Stumbling happily, pretty much everywhere, and through everything, while discovering art, and ourselves along with it.
Working on the 2nd edition of the first book in the trilogy, Torrents of Our Time, was essentially just a question of tightening up a few of the stories, dropping one, and adding a new one. Pretty much the same is true with working on the second book of the trilogy, The Fiddler in the Night. I tightened up a few things. No big structural changes. But I do know they are better books for having done this. And that was the goal. This last book, however, was different. I originally wrote it in a flurry, in different locations, at the end of a journey that had brought me back to writing in 2014. Leaving Oakville in 2021 was the end of that journey. Of all three books, this third one, I probably shouldn't have released it when I did. And so here I am, after all of this time of never fully understanding what was there, dealing with it. Unlike the others, I will pull the first edition down and re-release the book with a new title: One Violent Day: LOVE, GUNS & GOD in America, and with a new ISBN. Am I trying to make the 1st edition disappear? Yes. Am I trying to move forward without acknowledging it? No. I understand process, and I understand the very nature of being human, and of failing, and trying again. Or, perhaps it's this: The books always knew I would be coming back to them to finish what I did not fully understand at the time I was writing them? Either way, it is all about this world of words - not me, and learning to make that enough. No matter what. As I hope it is for you, too.
Montreal Publishing Company has brought out a 2nd edition of my novel THE FIDDLER IN THE NIGHT. If you haven't read it, now is the time to discover why The US Review of Books called it "a work of art in word form."
I hope enjoy it, and consider leaving a review.
#tragic #lovestory
"At times THE FIDDLER IN THE NIGHT is a thriller reminiscent of the dark, intense work of Cormac McCarthy. At times it’s a coming-of-age tale, or a precise portrait of middle America. It manages to be all these things, while also telling an absorbing story. This is a cat-and-mouse tale set in grand, lonely landscapes and peopled with characters that feel achingly real."
- Neon Books, UK
some thoughts on writing
“And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns ... that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale ... that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.” - Bob Dylan
“The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.” – Albert Camus. And from this we begin to write.
“Writing is always rooted in something beyond language, but develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti-communication, it is intimidating.” - Roland Barthes
"The best songs are the songs you write that you don't know anything about." - Bob Dylan
“Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you good for?” - James Joyce
"If you have no critics, you’ll likely have no success." - Malcolm X
“All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom.” - Leo Tolstoy
"When ‘great literature’ is replaced by ‘excellent fiction’, that’s the real betrayal of higher education." - Elif Batuman
“Life is too short to read a bad book.” - James Joyce
“I feel like a wet seed wild in the hot blind earth.” - William Faulkner
“The days are stacked against what we think we are." Jim Harrison. And so, the less we think we know, the better situated we for writing fiction.
"The word is a flame burning in a dark glass." Sheila Watson
"Write dangerously. - James Joyce
"Imagination is everything.' - Albert Einstein
"Be writing." - William Faulkner
“The role of a writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say.” - Anais Nin
"Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking too." - Jim Harrison
"The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art, and cinema." - Werner Herzog
Mine: “Great literature is written from the pulse of blood running through the veins of thought, and not by the meaning of it.”