News

This life of ours isn't ours. The brevity and happenstance alone shows us that. It isn't a circle, not really. It's not a line from here to there. They're fine enough shapes, but they've no depth, not much room for mystery and consequence. This is surely a time for mystery and consequences. For them you need a spiral. A spiral gets you memory without repetition. It wrings wisdom from experience. It's from the spiral that you draw down the rough magic of being born, the alchemy of Godparenthood, the greying heart of age, the grief love of dying, the awe of all of...

Event Details Birth & Death Among Us with Stephen Jenkinson and Kimberly Ann Johnson Part 1/3 of an 3 part on-line conversation on successive Sundays starting January 15th R e g i s t r a t i o n link ($225 Regular Price). You've misheard your spouse. In most people's' worlds - even the morally and ethically single, even the polymorphous - those four words spell out foreboding, and things going sideways. 'Giving' heading off in the direction of 'misgiving'. Or worse. A while ago my wife's birthday was coming on with haste. She's a person prone to giving herself. I don't know why...

I've been asked from time to time whether I mind that not many people of colour - not my phrase for it - come to things I do. My answer, then and now, is: not at all. I would want for their sakes that there are some of their own people who are doing good work - of course, there are - and I would want them to go there. This being the ideologically segregated time that it is, the question isn't surprising. I'm rarely asked about kids coming to what I do. I was asked the other day, though,...

You take a few steps up to the stage, and go to the microphone. The people behind you take their places. The lights in the house go dim. The people before you disappear. You make as if the entirety of the world is here, now. You give yourself some kind of redemptive task to fulfill. You commence the conjuring. The music murmurs. You speak. Two hours later, you thank the people for the gift of their evening. Mostly they're on their feet, uncertain of what might have just happened. An hour later, you're in a hotel room somewhere, more uncertain...

I close my eyes when I sing. I always have. As far as I can tell, it’s not to exclude the watching crowd, or the band with me on stage. It’s to include the words. I get distracted easily, interpreting people’s postures and facial expressions, and a full-on conversation starts in my head while I’m trying to wring whatever I can from the words and the silences between them. At a show in Denver, I’m packing my gear and an elderly woman approaches the stage in the now empty theatre. In a clear Irish lilt (she’s from the Old Country), she lets me know how thankful she...

If you mean to undertake something vast, they say, you've every reason to expect that there'll be something vast in the offing. But that doesn't mean you'll gain the prize, or that your dreams will come true. It just means that there'll be a wake of sorts fanning out from your work, a web of consequence that you generate but don't intend. It's just a kind of psychic physics: "equal and opposite reaction", and all that. It's best to calculate for that, too if you're able. The Nights of Grief and Mystery tour/2022 is now well underway: over the last...

It’s hard to know what an audience at A Night is thinking…or feeling. For one, they aren’t really an audience, they’re unintentional allies in a ceremony. They don’t seem to know it, but we do. Beyond the applause and standing O’s, there is the ever foggy sense of “are they with us?” as we spin the kind of glass that we do. No suspension of disbelief is required for this kind of evening. The deal we are trying to make with them is a different one altogether. If there is good will in the building, we can generally pick up...

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 Gods - but we'd never played it. Not together. So we chanced it. We threw the knuckle bones, swept the floors, laid the wires, made the calls. December 12'd ourselves. We tuned and toned, had a few drinks, told some lies, loosened up. Asked the Old Worthies...

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 from Robert Bly, bless his bones. He wrote: "It takes a lot of courage to be idle." Also clever. I found the momentum of retreating from the fray, it's encouragement and sustenance, to be very short lived. The novelty wore off drastically fast, and then came the...