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.
The 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 essayA number two graduate students invented in 1994, a man who should have had thirty more years, and a girl who was given no details at all.
Read the essayA dog leash, a dishwasher drawer, and the only time Odysseus plans ahead.
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.