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Night of Grief and Mystery coming to Capitol Theatre

Gregory Hoskins and Stephen Jenkinson bring their unique show to Nelson on Tuesday.
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Gregory Hoskins and Stephen Jenkinson bring their unique show to Nelson on Tuesday. Photo submitted

Gabriel Keczan is hosting a special Night of Grief and Mystery as a love letter to the community on Tuesday, Nov. 12 at the Capitol Theatre.

“As a counselling therapist working with grief is a major part of what I do,” he says. “I’ve been deeply touched by Stephen Jenkinson’s written work on grief, death and culture change. This show synthesizes his 30-plus years of wisdom-filled stories about end-of-life matters by enveloping it in a musical container of soulfullness. It is going to be a special night.”

Author/activist Jenkinson and recording artist Gregory Hoskins fuse their separate work into an evening that is part book reading, part concert, part poetry, part lamentation, part ribaldry, part lifting the mortal veil. That’s what’s been performed to sold out houses in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England, Scotland, Wales, Iceland and the U.S.

Jenkinson is a teacher, author, storyteller, spiritual activist, farmer and founder of the Orphan Wisdom School, a teaching house and learning house for the skills of deep living and making human culture. There is an award-winning National Film Board of Canada documentary about his work called Griefwalker.

“We aren’t poets, I wouldn’t say, but the evenings are poetic,” Jenkinson says. “They are musical and grave and raucous and stilling, which probably means they are theatrical. They are nights devoted to the ragged mysteries of being human, and so grief and endings of all kinds appear.

“They are nights in which love letters to life are written and read. 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. What would you call such a thing? We call them Nights of Grief and Mystery.”

The show begins at 7 p.m.