TOYNBEE TRAIL

When the end of my thirties loomed my mother play-glared at me on the eve of my birthday and half declared and half prayed as follows: "I don't have a forty year old son!" She did, though. And the current odometer would gall her still: she has a son who's...

THE GONENESS OF A FUTURE

If you're in the mood for meme-length considerations, I'd move on if I were you. This is likely to be lengthy. It'll cover some ground. In the lobby after last night's show a man outwaited all the other patrons to offer me dramaturgical advice, to wit: the end of the festivities...

WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?

It's called 'a world tour', this thing of ours. Grand-sounding. Over the top for Canadians to say about themselves. And there isn't much agreement about the scale or range that makes up a 'world' jaunt. One thing's more certain than not, though: small places don't usually qualify for world...

TWO BEWILDERMENTS, AND THE WIND BLOWING THROUGH

Some days stagger to their conclusion. We're far from home, in someone else's land, holding out for a kindly reception for our heart's labours. The morning's day off has been spent not touring the haunts of my Harvard days, but in a hotel foyer, waiting on the repair of...

A LINTY THING

Torrid Tucson night The second act of your three act play - if you get one - is there for you to find those with whom you'll live out the reasons for your birth and your persistence up unto the present moment. It's outrageous good fortune just to get one....

Love, and Grief and Mystery

I know - or I'm fairly sure, and that's as close to 'know' as the circuitry of being modern and home-seeking and confused by freedom allows - that there are people out beyond my ken who receive, and sometimes read, and sometimes consider these things I compose and send....

A STAY

It's a delicate business, this boycotting. The best of people wants justice to prevail, starting anytime. Starting last week. Starting now. Good will: we could start there. But good will is a complicating business. Boycotting a country is a bit like taking the hippocratic oath: maybe, if you withhold your...

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...

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...

Birth and Death Among Us

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...

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...

Knotwork

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...

A Rabbi For a Minute

Maybe a year before the pandemic set in, maybe two, I was on a bit of a European speaking tour. Somehow an invitation came to appear in Israel, from a standing start, with no prior contacts that I knew about. What might I have to bring to a place...

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...

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,...

Reckoning the Kids

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...

You Begin in The Light

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...

I Close My Eyes

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...

Psychic Physics

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...

John of the Laundromat

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...

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 —...

If I were you, I would be skeptical

BE/LONGING

Can’t Fix Wonder

The Stranger Silence Between

One Post, One Beam

Gig Mechanics

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