Simple Solutions
to Hard Problems
Simple, not easy. Essays on inheritance, faith, family, and the ordinary made sacred — what we receive, what we owe, and what love requires us to do next.
Recent Writing
Short essays — contemporary, plainspoken, and built from family stories.
My brother, who somehow became both an engineer and a musician, has a phrase he reminds me of often. “You have to tune the instrument.” Coming from him, it makes perfect sense. Engineers know that neglected equipment eventually fails. Musicians
Read the essayTwenty-five years after September 11. Twenty-nine floors up. Fifty-four people waiting on me. What anchors do you reach for when the world turns upside down?
Read the essayThe inner critic showed up with an editor’s visor and a clipboard. Everyone is writing about Odysseus, she said. Half right is not a note.
Read the essayA preschool teacher declined to warn the children away from the swings: "Why? They only do it once." I gave my kids glass cups for the same reason. Discipline and disciple come from the same root — and the tuition rises with time.
Read the essayA defibrillator, a forged excuse note, and what my mother understood about love that I didn't.
Read the essay
Lara Catledge Reedick
Lara writes for people with hard heads and soft hearts. Her work moves between personal essay, spiritual reflection, and history — always circling the same question: what do we owe each other, and what does love actually require us to do next?
She holds a graduate degree from Georgia Tech and is currently pursuing doctoral work in history, focused on how Catholic and Protestant institutions responded to Black citizenship in the post-Reconstruction Lower Mississippi Valley. That same instinct — to look for the story underneath the official one — shows up in everything she writes, whether it’s a booklet on simple solutions to hard problems or a family’s hundred-year silence.
She is also at work on When We Were Apart, a historical novel about a Louisiana Creole family divided across a century by silence, by the river, and by the institutions that decided who they were permitted to be. Read more at whenwewereapart.com.