Newsletter

You think you know your life. You know the gateways, the walls and windows, the trapdoors. Maybe it's truer to say that you know about your life what you can...

Join Stephen Jenkinson in-person this summer for STAGGERED • STILLED • SUMMONED  A Thinking Man’s Brush With Neurodegeneration July 16-19, 2026Orphan Wisdom HallOntario, Canada An in-person event with Stephen Jenkinson...

In case your life has been uneventful lately: no matter how anticlimactic or prosaic that might sound, there is great merit in a slow moving, recoverable life. It affords its...

To imagine, to dream that an ocean away, on the far side of half a millenium's separation, there are people willing to give you a hearing, or a chance, or...

Time was I saw no likelihood that I'd have any of you to the Orphan Wisdom teaching hall ever again. It was a frailty in the imaginal extremities that had...

THE ROAD Just the sound of the those two words together makes something inside of me leap. Sometimes it's a recipe for disaffection. Sometimes it soothes it. But I've been...

SECOND CHANCE SMOKE In a shaky world you'd think you might take refuge in a clear eyed regard for your own little likelihoods: what you're capable of, and keen on,...

Matrimony in Real TimeStephen Jenkinson March 21-22, 2026Victoria, BC, CanadaTen seats remain It's a hundred years since Eliot unleashed The Waste Land on the western imagination. You might remember "April...

Two Pieces of News Last week a mix of Orphan Wisdom Scholars and Orphan Wisdom Scribes gathered in the Great Hall to transcribe a 2017 recording. Then this past weekend...