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.
At twenty-five I wrote about losing my grandfather — a Baptist minister I'd fought with over everything. Thirty years later, I understand what I was actually writing about: how the dead continue to love the living. The Church has a name for it.
Read the essayEarlier today I was inching through stop-and-go traffic on the interstate when I noticed a state patrol officer traveling alone in the HOV lane. No lights. No siren. Just one person in a patrol car moving steadily past
Read the essayAnyone who has spent time backpacking learns an important lesson very quickly: Weight matters. Before setting out on a long trail, every item gets scrutinized. Do I really need this? How often will I use it? Is there a lighter
Read the essay“As long as a piece of string.” That was my English teacher’s answer when a student asked how long an essay had to be.
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.