Author: HEATHER KING

  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AUGUST 8, 2025: AGAINST EASE, SUMMER IN THE DESERT, AND IRELAND AHEAD

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AUGUST 8, 2025: AGAINST EASE, SUMMER IN THE DESERT, AND IRELAND AHEAD

    This week’s Angelus News column is called “Against Ease” (or was, before they changed the title to “How Much Failure and Suffering Must One Endure for a Good Life”).

    Anyway, as Flannery O’Connor observed: “We are all rather blessed in our deprivations if we allow ourselves to be.”

    Here in the Sonoran Desert, the high yesterday was 113. The whole last two weeks it’s been well above 100 every day. The effect is kind of like an extended snow day back East. You’re excused from just about all activity. Noon Mass is fun cause the thermometer in the car will say like 121 degrees when you come out afterwards and till the A/C kicks in you have to handle the steering wheel like a hot potato.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AUGUST 1, 2025: THE JOYS OF ROAD TRIPS, AGING, AND THE LORD TAKING HIS OWN SWEET TIME

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER AUGUST 1, 2025: THE JOYS OF ROAD TRIPS, AGING, AND THE LORD TAKING HIS OWN SWEET TIME

    This week’s Angelus News column is about Georgia folk artist Nellie Mae Rowe, her vibrant drawings, installations, sculptures, and paintings, and the phantasmagorical “playhouse” she created from, in, and around her modest bungalow.

    The link leads to a guided tour of the current exhibit at the California African American Museum called Really Free: The Radical Art of Nellie Mae Rowe.

    Plus, check out the free preview of my latest Substack post: The Joys of Road Trips, Jane Eyre, and Aging:

    “Write only if you must, but, if you must, do not let yourself be discouraged by either youth or age. For ‘of making books there is no end’.”

    –From Iris Irigo’s Images and Shadows: Part of a Life

    Check it out and consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to Desire Lines: Books, Culture, Art...two or three times a week, you’ll receive the same kind of posts I’ve featured on my blog for the past 15 years! Come on over! Subscribing is a beautiful way to support my life and work.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 25, 2025: THE CHILDLIKE HEART, A ROSE GARDEN, AND BE PREPARED TO WITNESS TO YOUR HOPE!

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 25, 2025: THE CHILDLIKE HEART, A ROSE GARDEN, AND BE PREPARED TO WITNESS TO YOUR HOPE!

    This week’s Angelus News column is about a chance encounter with a fellow random, gloriously joyful loner, in a rose garden, on the 4th of July. It’s also a paean to LA, and a tribute to the child-like heart.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 18, 2025: THE PARADOX OF BEAUTY AND THE POVERTY OF PRAYER

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 18, 2025: THE PARADOX OF BEAUTY AND THE POVERTY OF PRAYER

    This week’s Angelus News column is a reflection on The Paradox of Beauty.

    I am off to St. Andrew’s Abbey next week for a private retreat. Very much looking forward.

    And a message from your sponsor!

  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 11, 2025: OUR FATHER WHO ART IN AN IRON LUNG

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 11, 2025: OUR FATHER WHO ART IN AN IRON LUNG

    This week’s arts and culture column is a review of a memoir (his first book, at 75!) by my college friend Dougie Dodd.

    Our Father Who Art in an Iron Lung is a memoir about growing up with a father who was stricken with polio in his early 30s and lived 21 more years.

    I visited the Norton Simon Museum today, home of Van Gogh’s “The Mulberry Tree,” Zurburán’s “Still Life with Lemons, Oranges and a Rose,” about which the Pultizer Prize- winning food critic Jonathan Gold once wrote an iconic essay, and Cézanne’s “Tulips in a Vase.”

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 4, 2026: FOUR GREAT CALIFORNIA FOOD WRITERS

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JULY 4, 2026: FOUR GREAT CALIFORNIA FOOD WRITERS

    This week’s Angelus News column profiles four stellar California food writers: Jonathan Gold, MFK Fisher, Alice Waters, and the lesser-but-should-be-better-known Helen Evans Brown, the mother of them all…

    Desire Lines won second place from the Catholic Media Association this year in the category Best Column, Arts, Culture, Food and Leisure.

    Leisure! Who has time for that?!

    I do! Sort of…

    My plan for the day is to motor down to the California African American Museum, stroll about the Exposition Rose Garden, and hit Immacuate Heart of Mary in East Hollywood for the 5:30 Mass.

    Speaking of Immaculate Heart of Mary–a little tribute, and a reflection on the ever-ridiculed, ever valuable virtue of purity.

  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 27, 2025: THE CHURCH OF CHRIST WITHOUT CHRIST

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 27, 2025: THE CHURCH OF CHRIST WITHOUT CHRIST

    This week’s Angelus News column riffs on the concept of The Church of Christ Without Christ that Flannery O’Connor’s Hazel Motes attepted to establish, with predictably tragicomic results, in Wise Blood.

    i had a lovely drive from Tucson to LA on Monday–all went off without a h.itch. I packed pretty well, only forgot a few items easily remedied by a short run to Rite-Aid. Stocked upon groceries at the Vermont Ave. branch of my beloved Jon’s Grocery. Picked up some library books at the Los Feliz branch. Mass at Our Lady of Good Counsel and, today, for the Sacred Heart of Jesus, downtown at the Cathedral.

    I went to start my car yesterday morning and the battery had died. How good of God to wait to let it happen here, on a safe residential street, rather than, say, on the 10 West in the blazing heart of summer. Thank you, AAA Plus.

    My time here will go quickly. Prayers, walks, work, museums, friends…

    Feel free to drop in to my Substack at DESIRE LINES: BOOKS, CULTURE, ART, where I post 2-3 times a week.

    And happy, happy summer.

  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 20, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 20, 2025

    Public shaming, scolding, and snitching aren’t punishable by law, but everyone knows betraying a friend is a dastardly moral crime.

    Or everyone used to.

    In this culture where calling out “friends” is actually lauded, in this week’s Angelus column I ponder the nobility of the martyrs who went the other way and died under torture.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 13, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 13, 2025

    This week’s Angelus News column is about a 1963 film called A Child is Waiting, directed by John Cassavetes. Burt Lancaster plays the psychiatrist director of Crawthorne, a state institution for children with mental and emotional disabilities, and Judy Garland is a new teacher who challenges his methods.

    Over on Substack you’ll find a review of Tove Jansson’s A Summer Book and another of Rose-Lynn Fisher’s A Topography of Tears.

    June is the hottlest month of the year here in Tucson, but I sort of like the long afternoons inside with my films and books and then Evening Prayer and Mass at Newman Center (I have other options as well).

    Still one slot left in my next Writing Workshop–it starts a week from tomorrow, so last call!

    PART OF THE BRIEF, GLORIOUS CACTI BLOOM FROM EARLIER THIS WEEK

  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 6, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER JUNE 6, 2025

    My Angelus arts and culture column this week is on one of my (many) soul-mates: the very strange Hans Christian Andersen:

    The truly brutal summer heat hasn’t yet quite kicked in here in the Sonoran Desert…though my front yard is overgrown with trees and agaves and is actually cooler than outside the “enclosure” as I’ve come to think of it, leading my monastic little life as I do.

    I’ve taken to having my morning prayer outside, on the glider, with my candle and incense, accompanied by the dawn chorus of my beloved birds. There are a pair of resident cardinals, tons of mourning doves, house finches, goldfinches, and white-throated sparrows, I spotted a vermilion flycatcher in the back yard last week–oh, hummingbirds, of course–and a Gila woodpecker (these also abound, very comforting to hear them hammering away at the telephone pole) recently performed his ablutions in the birdbath…

    Anyway, this, to me, is the “abundance” and “prosperity” people natter on about.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 30, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 30, 2025

    This week’s arts and culture column features a podcast (the only one I listen to, actually) I HIGHLY recommend: Haptic & Hue.

    From the H & H website:

    Haptic & Hue explores the way in which cloth speaks to us and the impact it has on our lives. It looks at how fabric traditions have grown up and the innovations that underpin its creation. It thinks about the skills that go into constructing it and what it means to the people who use it. It looks at the different light textiles cast on the story of humanity.

    All of humanity, not only women. This is a quality offering, and the people who make it do the world a great service.

    Other news: The entire month of May in Tucson has been heaven. Temps haven’t yet soared to the uncomfortable 100-degree plus range. I spend each early monring on my front patio enjoying my aviary. A pesky ground squiirrel has teken up residence under an adcaent shed and keeps trying to dig a burrow in the back yard which I just know would extend underneath the house. Let’s just say I am an a first-name basis with several of the personnel at Termagon.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 23, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 23, 2025

    This week’s Angelus News column is about the (my) unfortunate tendency to want the people I help to have PROMISE! Ha ha, good luck with that! Just ask Jesus…

    On other fronts, I am having fun over at Substack and invite you to join me there.

    I’m working up a column on four or five California food writers, which will make for some juicy reading.

    I’m looking forward to my upcoming visit to LA, followed by a retreat at St. Andrew’s Abbey.

    I have subscribed for a month to MAX in order to watch ROLAND GARROS aka the French Open. It took me months to recover from Garbine Muguruza’s retirement, but now my gal is Peyton Stearns.

    And I am deep in silence, solitude, gratitude, and prayer.

    Wishing one and all a lovely three-day weekend.

  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 16, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 16, 2025

    In this week’s Angelus News column, I write about Father Donald Haggerty’s new book: The Hour of Testing:: Spiritual Depth and Insight in a Time of Ecclesial Uncertainty. Interesting that the book’s publication coincided almost exactly with the election of our new Pope. Let’s all pray for him!

    Meanwhile, head over to my Substack: DESIRE LINES: Books, Culture, Art where I post 2-3 times weekly.

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  • WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 9, 2025

    WEEKLY NEWSLETTER MAY 9, 2025

    My Angelus News column this week is about the cloitered nuns of Santa Rita Abbey in Sonoita, Arizona: a place where I’ve made several private retreats.

    Oh right–and we have a new Pope! Glory be to God and may he lead us with clarity, fidelity, and humility. Let’s pray for him–what a job.

    In case you missed it, I’m offering a new Writing Workshop:

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