The creation of The Scriptorium ~ Echos of an Orphan Wisdom marks a significant milestone in the evolution of the Orphan Wisdom School.

After one and a half years of planning, sorting and curating transcriptions we are ready to make our ribbon-cutting announcement.

The Scriptorium Library opens to Lineage Members on Monday, September 15th, 2025.

Stephen Jenkinson will speak with us on Zoom
Sunday, September 21st
8am HT/ 11am PT/ 2pm ET/ 7pm in GMT

Come and gather to raise your hand or a glass with us !

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A writing life is a wondrous thing to be afforded. It is driven by travail, it travels acres of uncertainty, and its inner workings are Oz-like, but it lends shine to its corner of the world, revelatory, refracting light. It amounts to dragging a mountain up a rock, more often than not. Yes it does. But it is gorgeously, materially simple. There’s the scribbler, there’s a chair, a table, some kind of light, and details. And decisions. You require no one’s permission or opprobrium. If you can sit, and if you’ve got the calamitous gift, and if you can manage the distractions and the daily bread, you stand a chance of writing.

I am not one of those who is a born writer. I came to it late, and I can go for long periods of time without pen in hand, unsummoned by those dusty worthies who seem to lay claim to the better skills and better days of the writing types. Instead, I am something of a story-hearer. That continues to be how the world occurs to me. Caldera, crater or cul-de-sac though life is, still the cadenced catastrophes claim my attention, and set something into motion in me that means to head out of town and see the sights. When that happens, my pen starts dowsing, and we’re off.

And with that has come a speaking life, where I’ve tried to learn and earn the rudiments of my citizenship as a child of a troubled time. Even with all the madnesses and adversaries on offer, still it’s the heart of human generosity I’ve found there. When you hit the mark, you can tell. People let you know, whether they mean to or not. Though they may be at odds with you, or at a loss because of you, still something stirs. And sometimes the room is charged with a kind of righteous ozone. And for the moment there are things that are possible, doable, assayable.

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Thanks to some technology, and thanks especially to those over the years – my wife, mostly – who saw these days coming, and nursed a notion, and pressed ‘record’ when the lights went up on me, there are now enough interviews, lectures, musings, digressions, diatribes, drastic moments and love letters to life to gang up on anybody’s attention span. And it doesn’t end there. Alumni of the Orphan Wisdom School and of the farm apprenticeships we’ve done, along with people who wish they’d made it to the School, under the inspired guidance of Nathalie Roy and Khadija Striegel, have begun a titan’s enterprise: somehow they mean to oblige a dramatic through line and some morphological order to appear in this vault.

I’ve just spent five days listening to myself, reading myself being AI transliterated. I must tell you that I was quietly honoured by the thought that there are people in this world who are doing this with a part of their lives. Though I was leary at first, and under-persuaded of the merits of what I managed to come up with on the fly, and dubious as to how amenable to order this material would ever be, I will say now that they’ve begun to do just what they said they’d do. After months of work, they’ve wrangled something like ten percent of what’s on hand. So there’s that.

As I sat with Chris Christou and arm wrestled the transliterations into transcriptions into translations, I had the remarkable privilege and pleasure of going back and forth between the persuasions of the writing me and those of the speaking me. I heard the different waters coursing through, the different missions, the different DNA of purpose and occasion, the lateral jive. I heard the unafflicted me in full voice. I grew a fondness for that man, and a regard.

To have a bit of one’s life’s work deemed worthy of this kind of attention and regard is a stilling thing. The shepherds of this Scriptorium enterprise are about to open the doors to the work room, and let some light in, and some of the curious in. Bless them.

Stephen Jenkinson
Founder of Orphan Wisdom