Entries by Stephen Jenkinson

PLAY IT

You might be a band when you say it. But you know you're a band when you play it. You could be a band when you learn your chops. But you know if you're a band once the needle drops. By year's end, our twenty months of waiting were done. We'd made a record - Rough...

All Out of Still

A few months ago a certain degree of unspectacular life adversity leaned over to me and whispered: "What if you stop for a while? You were obliged off the road anyhow by the plague. Why not go the rest of the way there, and choose stillness?" Clever fellow. Years ago I remember coming across some stout advice...

A Memory

Robert Bly has died. Another old tree is gone from the canopy. The light that's let in is harsh, more revelatory than illuminating. I knew him for a time, corresponded for maybe a year or two. I found him remarkably kind and generous in person. He torpedoed Money and the Soul's Desires in its early iteration, drawing...

QUIET

I've had the chance over the past two weeks to get the lay of the pestilential land, thanks to a short but intense Nights of Grief and Mystery tour in B.C. I've seen how these last twenty months have treated some of my fellows. And that set me to thinking, and reconsidering. And the...

DRY BONES

We call them 'playing cards' now. That's in keeping with how we tend to treat things whose importance or consequence we've lost track of. They end up in the 'entertainment' bin. Or else we blithely hand them over to the kids to distract themselves with, so they might leave us to our distractions in...

REMEMBER

Reading and living: For both you need a strategy to contend with the mechanics. There's the body, and there's the book. To find out what happens, you have to turn the page. To keep things moving, you leave things behind. You turn the page, knowing that as you do so that page goes unclear, and...

GRIEF/DIRT

A few years ago I was doing the unimaginable: dealing in person, unmasked and in real time, with a teller in the small bank in the village close to where I live. The bank's manager, who kindly keeps abreast of my work via my newsletters and such, came out of her office to say...

Look

I've for the most part been sitting down, these last sixteen months. I've been writing a book, which partly explains it. I'm hardly going anywhere. No plan I make survives the news. All that sitting makes for numbness, here and there, now and then. Occasionally I try to mobilize. Maybe something comes in that's...