About me
Contact: public@michaeljwking.com
I am English by birth and British by subject. My mother and father are likewise, and as our own family history can best indicate we have always been (though I think there is a touch of Irish in there somewhere far back). We are "of the land," and while we have our roots all over Britain, I myself am of South London (Croydon, please don't judge). There, in July 1988, I had the great misfortune of being born with retinoblastoma but the great counter-fortune of keeping both my eyes.
And so it goes. As a child I moved around, particularly around Norfolk and Essex. As a teen I travelled and found little to keep me still. During these years I fostered an academic interest in Astronomy and Physics, and at school this path took me both to the Royal Society in London and Cape Town in South Africa. I then went to university, becoming an alumni of the University of Kent and UC Berkeley to obtain a Masters in Astronomy, Space Science, and Astrophysics in 2011.
During that time I was also thinking about a formal religious life, having taken my own Catholic faith seriously since university. After graduating, I entered Postulancy in Ireland with the Franciscans after contemplating both Dominican and Carmelite flavours and rhythms. Though my discernment there was brief, it was the right thing to go into and also the right thing to come home again. I am no less Catholic for it, just more myself. Since then, I have become a trained Catechist - a teacher of the faith - and I currently live and work as a piano teacher while sorting myself out for writing full time.
And at this present chapter in my life, my past having been sketched in, this is where you enter. Welcome; may our journeys together be well and after we part ways, may they continue to be well for you wherever they lead.
michaeljwking.com
I started this website in 2020 with the aim to have a place for my voice. As you can probably tell by the sporadic dates of the published articles, I am still finding it. This also means that the site is something of an experiment in voice, as there is no dedicated subject matter, nor is there any marketing, nor even anything resembling an academic or other professional presence. There is just me and the things that matter to me.
What I'd like to also say is that what I've written in the past, while certainly a matter of record, may not reflect my current understanding. It would be a strange and cruel thing, I think, to keep to any one view for so long without it being so much as tested and refined let alone changed. And so, I search, discover, reflect as I live.