News Archives - Orphan Wisdom

If I were you, I would be skeptical

Two months from now, I will be heading to the old Kilbey place, the home of the Orphan Wisdom School for the fifth time in the last eighteen months. Compared to many of you reading this, I'm probably relatively new to StephenJenkinson (I usually say it in one breath, no space between),. In August 2021, in...

BE/LONGING

I've toured a lot in the last decade, though things pandemical put a crimp - a proper, necessary crimp - in automatic travel for a while. When I started all this, paper maps - the ones with the worn folds obliterating some of the critical information, with road food stains making it hard to read...

Can’t Fix Wonder

I'm invited to a lot of interviews. I think I cooperate with the interviewers. It's an honour to be asked. I try to be a good guest. I find that even the confrontations seem to go fairly well. I'm a fan of mystery, which keeps me saying yes. The last one was uncommon, though. It...

The Stranger Silence Between

Why do we say silence ‘falls’, like it’s some kind of cloud lurking in the rafters just waiting to descend uninvited, when it is The Host that welcomes us in to an empty space in the first place, there before we arrive and there after we leave? A man walks alone, from pool of light to pool of...

One Post, One Beam

The origin story of the Nights of Grief and Mystery is an unlikely dovetail joint of timing (the Deity's middle name), money (not ours) and self-unemployment (Hoskins and me). Within eighteen months of our meeting we were touring widely, and people were coming to the shows on several continents, we had a record, and...

Gig Mechanics

The arrow doesn’t know The target or the bow It’s born in air Dangerously unaware. It flies a faithful arc Through skies light and dark No promise it finds its’ mark But it flies anyway. From “Arrow” ©2022, Gregory Hoskins Let’s say you have a good notion of what you’re supposed to be doing with your life — some use the term “a...

The Marvelous, and The Nights

That the one day ends with you playing a rapturous concert in an ages-old theatre in Dublin town, that the following one ends with you bumping into the furniture in the dark at your own house on the other side of the Atlantic, trying to persuade your jetlag that it really is night: something...

A Hand in the Dark

Dear Ones, Last year Stephen Jenkinson and I recorded two podcasts that were the most listened to of anything I have ever recorded. In their wake, even though I knew he was stepping back, I gathered the courage to invite him to share five Sundays together- a kind of retrospective of his major works. There are so...

Starling

In the midst of the sorrow and combustion that has laid claim to the last years/months/weeks, a few of us gathered in a dank former factory on a cloudy afternoon. Over 5 hours, we played and sang, and recited, and a few friends we invited shot the proceedings on iPhones and committed the sounds...

Watch the preview of the Dead Starling Session

Please feel free to share this with friends and family: A ten-minute excerpt from Dead Starling Session. The two pieces that started it all—Gregory's Take a Little Walk and Stephen's poetic response All the Songs of Love—were last-minute additions to the lineup of the film. What you see here is the first take of the song and the...