Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW

Culture activist, worker, author.

Stephen has taught internationally and is the creator of the Orphan Wisdom School, co-founded with his wife Nathalie Roy in 2010. The School convened semi-annually in Ontario, and in the  Gulf Islands, Canada and in Wales and Iceland.

He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).

Apprenticed to a master storyteller when a young man, he worked extensively with dying people and their families, is former programme director in a major Canadian hospital, and former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school.

He is also a sculptor and traditional canoe builder whose house won a Governor General’s Award for architecture.

Since co-founding the Nights of Grief and Mystery 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. and Europe, Australia and New Zealand. They released their Nights of Grief & Mystery album in 2017, and at the end of 2020 released two new records: Dark Roads (live work) and Rough Gods (studio work).

He is the author of Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work (2025), Reckoning (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 is a contributing author to Palliative Care: Core Skills and Clinical Competencies (2007).

Stephen Jenkinson is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker, a portrait of his work with dying people. Lost Nation Road, (2019, dir. Ian Mackenzie), is a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours, and Murmurings of the Land (2025, dir. Mattias Olsson), a portrait of Stephen’s land-based life.

His books, recordings and DVDs are available at the Orphan Wisdom Shop.To inquire about Stephen Jenkinson’s work, speaking engagements, live-streams, counsel calls, concerts, media interviews and The Scriptorium, please contact us.

About The Writer

Conceived while the ash of the Second World War settled. A sustained and sustaining influence thereafter.

I was read to beginning then, and for years afterward. Some ability to story-hear and story-see came to me, and persists.

Very young and, mysteriously, dying. Physicians can’t explain when, a week later, I didn’t die after all. Eventually, everyone in the house got used to this, and it was forgotten.

Shipwrecked in the Mediterranean. A stone mason in Gibraltar. An angel seized me by the scruff in Notre Dame Cathedral. Other misadventures deepened my days.

Harvard University (Master of Theology): Fell in love with learning, received an unearned scholarship and became a legal alien. In the normal confusion of such a thing I enlisted in training for the priesthood, having never been to church. I was counselled otherwise, which was a good idea for everyone involved. The strange dream of a devotional life was traded for learning something of the history of the world.

Gathered up into an undeclared apprenticeship to a magisterial black storyteller in America, a man aflame, and from him learned the majesty of the spoken word. Here I saw incarnate human courage conjured by an endangered, endangering time, and everything changed.

University of Toronto (Master of Social Work): Here I obtained a working visa that granted me entry to the helping professions. Years were spent learning the elaborations of human sorrow. Marriage and children. The limits of all things psychological became clear. The mythic and poetic poverty of my time became clearer. This was the principal affliction.

I began a decade in the desert unawares. Learned some skills of the hand: stone carving, canoe making. Built a house and swear I’ll never do it again.

I wrote a book about money and what I imagined are the soul’s desires. The publisher went bankrupt. The book was discontinued before it was continued. I buy cases of it from a bargain book outlet in a mall, and swear I’ll never do it again. Somewhere in there I entered the second half of my life.

Though clearly not organizational material I was courted into the health care system. Unwisely I accepted. First encounters with the mysteries of palliative care. I was now in the death trade unawares, where no one wants to die. The unadorned madness of a death phobic culture invited me to dance, and I danced. I appoint myself its adversary. The beneficiary of benign administrative neglect, I inadvertently began the revolution of death-centred care. For a while it worked: creator of a centre for children’s grief, assistant professor in a medical school. The revolt was time sensitive: I was counselled otherwise again. Marriage again.

The National Film Board of Canada produced a documentary on my work from this time: Griefwalker. I built another house and swore …

People bereft of ceremonial tuition asked me to do their weddings, their baby blessings and house blessings and funerals, and I did them. The great longing for ancestry and for elders was under it all. An Anishnaabe elder called me “a great rememberer,” another worthy assignment. I began farming. Desirous of big learning I conjured a school for orphan wisdom that might teach the unauthorized history of North America and other things, certain that no one would come. I was wrong again: they did. Taught across the continent and in Europe. Life resembled an extended rock-and-roll tour, minus everything you can think of. Grandchildren.

Somewhere in there I decided to testify to what came to me during my time in the death trade. My breathing was troubled, continuing to live became iffy, we went to Mexico in the event that this was it. I wrote the dying book in the shadow of an overlooked Aztec pyramid. I called it Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul. The “manifesto” part troubled some people, but I decide to be honest about it.

I don’t die after all, again. I go on.
2017 Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW

p.s. 

Toured the world. Became a reluctant song and dance man. Wrote a book about elderhood, seeing my age. Wrote another about matrimony, but then there was a pandemic. Wrote a pandemic book, another about collaboration. Turned seventy. Out of the clear blue, a diagnosis. My turn, it seemed. Degenerative, but not fatal.

Many things no longer likely. Almost everything of the public life staggered to a standstill. Swayed, the wind in my head, waited for a sign, learned something epic about sadness. Somehow – habit, probably – wrote most days while shuffling through the year’s ruins. The first autobiography, about undoings, happens.

I go on.

2025