Curious?
Laura is a summa cum laude graduate of Kutztown University with a Bachelor's of Science in Biology and a minor in philosophy—a combination that taught her to see the world through both microscope and metaphor.
She worked as a secretary for a number of years before discovering that homeschooling her f̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶f̶i̶v̶e̶ six children was really just an excuse to read everything she'd always wanted to read, but with witnesses. A regular participant in the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church, she lives in small-town Pennsylvania where she and her family hike near the Appalachian Trail, tend a garden that teaches them more about grace than they teach it about growing, and explore the world with the kind of curiosity that makes ordinary Tuesday afternoons feel like expeditions.
She worked as a secretary for a number of years before discovering that homeschooling her f̶o̶u̶r̶ ̶f̶i̶v̶e̶ six children was really just an excuse to read everything she'd always wanted to read, but with witnesses. A regular participant in the liturgical life of the Orthodox Church, she lives in small-town Pennsylvania where she and her family hike near the Appalachian Trail, tend a garden that teaches them more about grace than they teach it about growing, and explore the world with the kind of curiosity that makes ordinary Tuesday afternoons feel like expeditions.
In 2024, she quietly launched Sex Ed For Sane People, a comprehensive Orthodox sex education curriculum for high schoolers—because she believes that conversations about sexuality should be as thoughtful and individualized as the young people having them. It's designed around Orthodox anthropology and relational understanding, customized for each student because cookie-cutter approaches tend to miss the whole point.
She writes at the intersection of enchantment and reality, in stories that ask what a life lived in faith might look like when viewed from another face of an icosahedron. Her work explores the secret languages she's learned to speak—the whispered conversations between fireflies and heartbreak, the ancient songs that stones sing when no one's listening. Currently, she's working on several projects for a wide range of ages, including a new children's book and an independently published magical realism series launching in 2026. 
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She's a dreamer, a reader, and the sort of renaissance woman who believes that learning how to do something badly is often more interesting than not doing it at all. Lately, she's been working on her backstroke (the water is patient), practicing arpeggios on her Celtic lap harp (the neighbors are less so), and re-learning how to rollerskate backwards—because apparently one has to start over from the beginning every time one has a new baby. She's still tackling a metastasizing TBR pile that has claimed most of an entire bookcase. Not shelf, case. This includes finally ruminating on those Karl Popper and Thomas Kuhn books a professor recommended twenty years ago. Sorry it took so long, Dr. Hall—some books have to wait for the right season of life.
Her published works include:
On Substack, she writes in both of C.S. Lewis's voices—sometimes looking "along the beam" through the lived experience of story, sometimes stepping back to examine it "at the beam" through analysis and reflection. At "dephilosophize me" she shares flash fiction that finds magic in the mundane, book reviews that dig into what makes stories work, and philosophical explorations that wrestle with the big questions that keep her up at night. Her essay "We Are All Fairies to Each Other," examining how the internet functions as a kind of digital fairyland, has been her most popular piece to date—probably because it captures something many of us feel but struggle to articulate about our online lives. She also contributes to "Patterns for Life" alongside Lisa Rose, exploring Orthodox Charlotte Mason homeschooling and the beautiful patterns that emerge when we let education be about more than just information. |