Nights of Grief and Mystery with Stephen Jenkinson and Gregory Hoskins

For those of you already familiar with Stephen’s work, including last year’s Nights of Grief & Mystery Tour North American tour, you’ll need no encouragement to purchase tickets now for his upcoming event here on Gabriola scheduled for May 5 at 7pm at the Phoenix Auditorium (at The Haven).

Nights of Grief and Mystery weaves together the extraordinary talents and skills of internationally renowned author, teacher, storyteller, and cultural activist Stephen Jenkinson with those of Toronto-based singer-songwriter Gregory Hoskins and his band. This an evening for young folk and old folk, for elders in training—an event of interest to parents and grandparents, teachers, scholars, health care professionals, clergy, counselors, and anyone else pondering matters around human development, rites of passage, aging, and wisdom.

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From the Nights of Grief and Mystery website:

These are nights in which love letters to life are written and read aloud. There’s some boldness in them. They have that tone. These nights have the mark of our time upon them, and they’re timely, urgent, alert, steeped in mortal mystery. They’re quixotic. They have swagger. They are nights devoted to the ragged mysteries of being human, and so grief and endings of all kinds appear. What would you call such a thing? We call them Nights of Grief & Mystery. Read more here.

Part poetry, part lamentation, part book reading, part ribaldry, part concert, part lifting the mortal veil and learning the mysteries there…that’s what’s in store. Watch the trailer here.

The tour is served by the reckless labours of local friends and accomplices who fashion genuine gigs in their home towns from their dreams for a better day, their labours amounting to a love letter of their own that they are writing to their towns or cities, an act of citizenship of the most profound and responsible kind.

That dark road thing? That image is more than an image. That is what we do. That is our devotional act.

About Stephen Jenkinson

Stephen is a Harvard Educated Theologian, Culture Activist, founder of The Orphan Wisdom School. He is the author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul, the award-winning book about grief, and dying, and the great love of life. He is the subject of a National Film Board of Canada documentary, Griefwalker. He brings teachings of the ramshackling kind, about honour and grace under pressure, about how we might learn our darkening times. His new book, Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble, wonders about elderhood in an age of age-intolerance, and about the withering of the World Tree. https://orphanwisdom.com/

About Gregory Hoskins

Gregory Hoskins’ career spans 11 recordings over 27 years and record deals on 3 continents. Hoskins’ lyrics and voice tend to break and bind at the same time in songs that are steeped in beauty and a muscular type of sorrow…and he does it over propulsive grooves, brooding electric guitar work, and rich sonics. He uses those sonic textures to underpin Jenkinson’s readings, too, using synth throbs along with vocal, trumpet, and live looping. Material from his most recent release, Vain + Alone, is featured in the Nights of Grief and Mystery. Please visit Gregory Hoskins Music to listen.