Author: D. A. Hosek
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“Elijah’s Funeral”: The story behind the story
I worked a long time on this story to make sure I got it absolutely right. I think maybe I did. The setting of the story is completely real. The Los Angeles Catholic Worker, Hennessy House and the Hippie Kitchen are all real places/institutions in Skid Row and Boyle Heights and were where I spent…
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A visit with my younger self: 19 February 1989
I was still homeless and hanging out on campus because I was part of our Model United Nations delegation to the Harvard Model U.N. conference. At this conference, the Vatican delegation was represented by students from a seminary in the Boston area and I found them to be fascinating, thus the following: Story idea: Catholic…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: St Hedwig (a day late)
Once again, I forgot to actually write up my visit to a church on the day it happened. St Hedwig is the sister church of St John Berchmans in the two-church St Carlo Acutis parish that I visited on Sunday. But where St John Berchmans is a restrained church (designed by a protestant architect I’ve…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint Teresa of Ávila
St Teresa of Ávila was my parish for a while around 2001–2 when I was involved with the music ministry for a while there. Add in that the feast of Saint Teresa is on my birthday and even though today was the first time I’d been to the church in almost a quarter century, I…
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Three new poems: Jubilate Mammonæ, Museum of Broken Hearts and Carmen Philomelaicum
I have three poems in the Autumn 2025 issue (Volume 51, Number 2) of California Quarterly: Museum of Broken Hearts Jubilate Mammonæ Carmen Philomelaicum The last is a translation of a Latin poem by Eusebius of Toledo, my first published translation.¹ I had read somewhere once that translating poems was an important part of the…
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The big countdown
This year’s life expectancy is up from 86 last year to 87 this year. It’s been a year of instability and uncertainty and disappointment, so hopefully the extra year won’t be something I’ll regret. As of tomorrow, I will have outlived the following (in no particular order) Abraham Lincoln Steve Jobs Adolf Hitler Ludwig van…
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Catholic nerd pilgrimage: Saint Carlo Acutis (St John Berchmans)
Carlo Acutis is not the first saint in this project whose life intersected with my own, but he is the first whose life was entirely within my own (not to mention being the most recently canonized—the first I’d heard of him, in fact, was when I was making the spreadsheet of parishes, saints and feast…
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New poem: Chicago Sonnet #42
Another poem from my Chicago Sonnets sequence is out in the debut issue of Big Score Lit. Despite being #42, it’s actually the first poem in the sequence and the one that inspired the project. There used to be a newsstand near the Adams station of the “L” in the loop and I was always intrigued…
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A visit with my younger self: 12 February 1989
At this point in my life, I was still essentially homeless and hanging out on campus before my return to Chicago, and yet I did have a girlfriend. She had told me that her roommate was crazy, but I didn’t really believe her until I encountered it firsthand: Wilma’s situation with her roommate leaves me…