Breakfast @ Epiphanies
RiR # 102, Season 14, Episode 10, Oct. 19, 2026
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Exploring experiential oddities
Another mind-bending, ear-tingling episode from Jerrel McQuen and Marc Rose. Forty years of "musings and revelation, dead ends and beginnings." McQuen and Rose promise "a sonic gallery of fears, inspirations and meditations." As the Grateful Dead sing, "What a long strange trip it's been."
Access the episode script
Background
"Breakfast @ Epiphanies" continues what is now a tradition of Portland-based storytellers Jerrel McQuen (writer) and Marc Rose (sound desginer): Re-booting their back catalog and shining up unheard sonic jewels from their alternate dimension/world of Farwan.
Re-Imagined Radio has proudly premiered their cinematic storytelling for several years. Frequency 43 in 2025. "Night of the Eclipsoid Man," Part 1 and 2 in 2024. Asezhia in 2023. And Twisted Epiphanies in 2022.
"Breakfast @ Epiphanies" is not only vintage McQuen and Rose—the stories began perculating more than forty years ago—but unique in their telling, using lyrics and poetry. Jerrel McQuen provides more details.
"Way back in the antediluvian 1980s, these ruminations started as a collection of intended lyrics, so its original title was Lyrica.
"Eventually I realized that the best lyrics sum things up in a single line. "She's not a girl that misses much." If longer, lyrics need to flow like river rapids. "Science is Slavery—a modern view. Better be careful. You could slip and fall right through."
"And the less forced a phrase, the better. So the later material became poetry and I called it Torque, for reasons detailed in our audio intro.
"Now, in our beleaguered 2020s, this material has become spoken word. So we pivot to "Breakfast @ Epiphanies," and hence the title pun.
"Forty years of 'musings and revelation, dead ends and beginnings'. It's a big, wide weird world out there, and in a shorter than it should be single lifetime, you can only scratch the surface of the existential strangeness. And the chronologically recent advent of runaway technology—not a normal evolution at all, impelled, I'm beginning to think by outside forces—only makes the ad hoc stew that much richer.
"What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.
"So dive in and sample the wares. They span a broad range of stimuli and reaction. I hope you enjoy the journey."
Production
Contents
Thirteen poems and one introduction, written by Jerrel McQuen and read by multiple voices familiar to regular Re-Imagined Radio listeners.
Introduction
"This collection started as a project called Torque, as in "a twisting force that tends to
cause rotation" which was a weird allegory for the way our planet and our lives corkscrew through space.
"I'm seriously missing the creative energy of the sixties through eighties, but, I try not to connect with it because those moments, that time I lived is now literally light-years behind us. Your soul has to reach back through all that distance and it pulls and it aches and it displaces you from the now. So the best discipline is to codify that longing into something that others can hopefully relate to.
"So here are a lifetime of longings and revelations, dead ends, and new beginnings. Let's raise a
virtual
mimosa to this audio poetry slam now dubbed "Twisted Epiphanies," and to the gifted artists who have
taken the two-dimensional and made it three, or more, as they explore the dark corners, echoing
expanses, and the sheer and incredulous oddity of life on Planet Earth."
Read by Jerrel McQuen
"Alien Braille"
"No no wants to admit the potential harm of the bizarre and intimidating technology now surrounding us.
But hiding our heads in the sand won't keep the true movers and shakers of this world from using it
against us."
Read by Chris Porter
"Anime Cafe"
"True love. Hard to find in a binary world of synthetic rainbow pixels."
Read by Cindy Brown
"The Graffafone"
"What if the true history of our world is far more complex and epic than we can possibly imagine. And we
are the Children of the Spectrum, waiting. Waiting to unlock and recover all its agonies and glories."
Read by Mark Homayoun
"Hue"
"Not sure about reincarnation, but ancestral memory? We are the latest manifestation of every lifetime
that engendered us. That's an inescapable connection."
Read by Cynthia McGean
"Antipodes"
"If someone is lost on this side, will they remain lost on the other? Or will your own unique Ron
Serling
lead you to the last sliver of azure light before the long night falls?"
Read by Chris Porter and Cindy Brown
"Sidewalk Art"
"Ambition can be a wonderful thing. But if you play the game too long, the house WILL win."
Read by Devin James
"B7"
"Mint jelly has an odd sunset road to salvation."
Read by Chris Porter
"School of Velocity"
"THOSE times can come again. Never assume we have progressed past them. The next generation of Panzers
may be juggernauts crunching through skeletons guided by a telepath who is his own machine."
Read by Cynthia McGean
"Free As A Bird"
"When this bizzare Beatles-Frankensong was released in 1995, I felt it was somehow intrinsically wrong,
completely side-stepping why Lennon wasn't here to do it himself. Somehow, I think he would approve of
this more pointed resisitation of events."
Read by Mark Hamayoun
"Crust"
"We all know there's something wrong. We dream it every night. We feel its shadow in the electric buzz
of
the modern midnight. We feel the presence of some 'other'."
Read by Cynthia McGean and Chris Porter
"Say Goodbye"
"If our souls have indeed lived past lives, what if not all of them played out on Earth. Maybe that
feeling of a missing piece in our lives, that longing for something more, is an echo from elsewhere that
mocks our present existence."
Read by Cynthia McGean
"Windup Man"
"Just another poly-anonymous white man assassin. Nothing to see here. Nothing at all."
Read by Marc Rose
"Lord Dunsany Overhears"
"Look up several species of small, furry animals gathered together in a cave and grooving with a pict,
or, Pressed Rat and Warthog eat an atonal apple, or three, under the Jabberwok tree and slide into the
fractual infinity eardrum of its spiraling bark divinity."
Read by Marc Rose
Cast
Jerrel McQuen. The man's writing is other worldly. Like a face plant while skying the Spurs of Erebor mountain range on Saturn's largest moon, Titan.
Marc Rose. A music composer and sound designer of dangerously delicions portions. A "double dip" of cinematic sound this time working the interspaces rather than hammering your heart. And, as you'll hear, a pretty incredible voice actor as well.
Chris Porter. A Portland-based voice actor—one of the greatest—voiced the character Vurlip with local sci-fi audio drama Exoplanetary. Appeared in the Willamette Radio Workshop production of The Fall of the City, presented by Re-Imagined Radio, 2022.
Mark Homayoun. Another Portland-based voice actor, and film actor. Appeared in the Willamette Radio Workshop production of The Fall of the City, presented by Re-Imagined Radio, 2022. Starred in Re-Imagined Radio's production of Restitution and Retribution, two crime fictions written by Cindy Brown.
Cynthia McGean. A writer, theater director, and producer, based in Portland, Oregon, and heavily invested in the Pacific Northwest audio drama and radio theater community. She has adapted the scripts and appeared in several iterations of "A Christmas Carol" performed by Willamette Radio Workshop, presented by Re-Imagined Radio since 2013. She directs the Writers-on-the-Air Workshop, an outcome of which was "Hiro & Liling," an original love story by Kristina Jones, a Portland-based writer, and offered by Re-Imagined Radio as Hiro & Liling / The Martian Death March, in 2021.
Devin James. A Portland-based actor, voice actor, and spoken word poet making a name for themself in local audio drama, theater, and voice-over projects.
Credits
Writer: Jerrel McQuen
Music composer/sound designer/post-production: Marc Rose
Significance
***.
Producer's Notes
Every episode shared by Jerrel McQuen and Marc Rose is a language-guided sonic bomb exploding on the
widescreen of your imagination. Don't have much imagination, you say? Well get ready for remodification.
You won't hear this sort of radio storytelling on The Moth, or any late night,
sleep-deprived rightous rant by Jean Shepherd or Joe Frank. Forty
years of
"musings and revelation, dead ends and beginnings," stewing ad hoc
in the creative minds of McQuen and Rose. Ready now to be uncorked. Consumed straight. No chaser. Dive
in. Sample the broad range of stimuli and reaction. As the
Grateful Dead say, "What a
long strange trip it's been." Indeed. McQuen and Rose say, "Enjoy the journey."
— John F. Barber
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