News

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 —...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Working a Sandy Shore

I've a new writing project. It's been nudging me for years - ever since I put my name on a piece of ground in the Ottawa Valley, in eastern Ontario. I'm thinking I'll write about all of this 'belonging to a place' trouble that so many who look like me...

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...

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...

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...

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...

Nights of Grief & Mystery Safe/Sound Salons West Coast B.C. Tour – Plague Document Books Readings

This is a little minor keyed announcement of the no-fanfare, low-rent, low-overhead, lowball, lowdown ramshackle reconnoiter of the state of affairs/state of siege/state of grace that prevails. To wit: a 'don't call it a tour' words and music tour of the B.C. coast. With great care and mindful of...

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...