Point Reyes Books – Live Interview with Stephen Jenkinson

Ned Buskirk is Co-Founder and Executive Director for YG2D [aka You’re Going to Die] – a 501(c)3 nonprofit bringing diverse communities creatively into the conversation of death and dying, inspiring life by unabashedly sourcing our shared mortality. YG2D offers a free creatively conscious mortality podcast, monthly live communal grief and gratitude open mics, medicinal community concerts, and grief and gratitude writing workshops. With YG2D’s prison program, ALIVE INSIDE, Buskirk facilitates a weekly suicide prevention group in San Quentin and hosts monthly grief and gratitude open mics and workshops. The prison program has expanded into multiple CDCR facilities throughout California, has visited multiple prisons in Ohio and works with our exonerated community, supporting those who have been wrongly incarcerated, along with the organizations and legal teams that free them. YG2D’s hospice and music program, SONGS FOR LIFE, sends musicians to play for the dying, inspiring original songs honoring their lives and deaths. Buskirk also facilitates creative space for cancer patients with UCSF’s Art for Recovery, with workshops online and at the hospital bedside, offering a chance for healing through creative self-expression and witnessing that lets the patient be wholly and fully witnessed while facing what is often the hardest time of their lives.

Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW
~ Culture activist / farmer / author ~

Stephen teaches internationally and has authored seven books of cultural critique. He is the creator and principal instructor of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. The School’s new project, The Scriptorium (2025), is creating an archive and library of his life’s work.

Apprenticed to a master storyteller as a young man, he worked extensively with dying people and their families. He is a former programme director in a major Canadian hospital and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school. Stephen has Masters’ degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).

In 2023 Stephen received a Distinguished Alumni Honours Award from Harvard University for “helping people navigate grief, exploring the liminal space between life and death, and connecting humanity through ceremony and storytelling.”

In August 2025, Sounds True released Stephen’s newest book: Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work. 

He is also the author of Reckoning(co-written with Kimberly Ann Johnson in 2022), A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns(2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions(a live teaching from 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life(a live teaching from 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation(2002). He was a contributing author to Palliative Care – Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).

Since co-founding the Nights of Grief and Mystery project with singer/ songwriter Gregory Hoskins in 2015, he has toured this musical/ tent show revival/ storytelling/ ceremony of a show across North America, U.K., Ireland, Israel, Australia and New Zealand. They released their first Nights of Grief & Mystery album in 2017, and at the end of 2020 released two new records: Dark Roads and Rough Gods. A new album release is planned for 2025.

Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker (National Film Board of Canada, 2008, dir. Tim Wilson), a portrait of his work with dying people, and Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours(2019, dir. Ian Mackenzie). Recently Mattias Olsson, a Swedish filmmaker released Murmurings of the Land (2025 Campfire Stories).

He was a stone sculptor turned wood-carver, and learned the arts of traditional birch bark canoe building. His first house won a Governor General’s Award for architecture. He now lives on a small scale organic farm in an off-grid straw bale house. The 120 year old abandoned granary from across the river which appeared in Griefwalker was dismantled in 2022 and re-erected at the Orphan Wisdom farm, where it is again a working barn.