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.
“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 essayMy 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 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.