Welcome!

I am a poet, essayist, memoirist and teacher. I began writing as soon as I could hold a pencil; the constant urge to capture my perspective on everyday moments, including the ordinary, remarkable, and difficult, has become a daily habit. My collection of writing is harbored in scattered journals, the backs of book covers, poems in my pocket, and untitled documents in Google Drive. Recently, I have been “digging” and harvesting my writing, molding these clumps of clay into collections that have helped me make meaning.

New Release

Linger: 21 Micro Essays on Love and Leave-Taking

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Linger: 21 Micro Essays on Love and Leave Taking by Laura Barr is a collection of deeply personal essays that reflect on the real and raw experiences of love, loss, and divorce. Each essay reveals a piece of the complex emotions of leave-taking. These essays resonate with their authenticity and offer moments of reflection.

Kind Words

"Laura's words take the reader on a potent micro-journey of one woman's walk with love and life."

She animates and illuminates what it is to woman in a complex world through falling-in-love-ness, the vows, the children, the potato leek soup making, the rage tsunami of aloneness, and the leave-taking after almost thirty years of marriage…all the while being gently witnessed and held by the backyard Hawthorn tree. Her nutrient-truth-dense words stir an appetite for more. Laura’s brilliant prose married with poignant spacing takes the reader through a Meow-Wolf-like-kaleidoscopic journey of a deeply lived life. A breathtaking work!

- Jenny Glick, Therapist, Writer, Torch Bearer for Women

"Laura Barr’s memoir in micro-essays expresses the kind of love that . . ."

Laura Barr’s memoir in micro-essays expresses the kind of love that goes beyond two; the kind strong enough to set a family in motion and keep it together even when that love changes shape. Linger is an ode, a song, a love letter to love lost, redefined, and found again.

- Ellen Blum Barish

Author of Seven Springs: A Memoir (Shanti Arts) and Views from the Home Office Window: On Motherhood, Family and Life (Adams Street Publishing).

Explore My Writing

Fallen Soldier

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Ehlers Danlos Vascular

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Glass Coffins

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The Heist

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About Laura Barr

Laura is a poet and essayist; Linger: 21 Micro Essays on Love and Leave Taking is her debut collection. Her work has appeared in Five Minutes: A Literary Magazine for Short Non-Fiction, and she is currently working on her next collection. In her spare time, Laura is a bibliophile, runner and lives a full life with her four grown children.

Laura lives in Colorado with her partner, Robert, and their cat, Henry. Every day, Laura draws inspiration from the ordinary, seeking beauty in tiny moments.

Work With Me

Speaking

Keynotes, panels, and workshops on education, personal growth, and helping students find their purpose.

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Publications

Contributing articles, essays, or guest posts for magazines, newsletters, and blogs. Get in touch for more details.

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Educational Consulting

Working with teenagers to discover their voice and purpose through the college consulting process, with a focus on growing good humans.

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Laura Barr

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Fallen Soldier

No one is jumping up in a mad rush to retrieve their luggage today, because there is a fallen soldier on our plane, still in his coffin, his family bringing him home, some of us are playing Sudoku, some of us are reading, and some of us wondering who is holding his mother’s hand while she grieves the loss of her only son.

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Ehlers Danlos Vascular

Every night, in the depths of slumber, I place my hand on his fragile heart and wonder if he is still alive until the thump-thump-thump comforts me, like a metronome for a musician, the lullaby that allows me to sleep.

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Glass Coffins

I am a barefoot girl running through the blue grass, wet with dew. The humid Kentucky air keeps the hair around my forehead damp, I don’t notice the tiny sweat dripping because I am running. No one is watching, and I am reaching, pulling from thick air fireflies and stashing them in Grandmommy’s glass canning jars. One, two, three, until the jar is filled with a bioluminescence glow. It is at this moment that I am sure. No, I am positive there is a God. Stumbling home with the lid on tight, I drift into a summer slumber accompanied by thousands of cicadas, only to awaken to a glass coffin filled with delicate, harmless, extinguished fireflies.

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The Heist

In a room that smells a mix of joy, grief, and cafeteria pancakes, your birth mother makes her offering. Her eyes are drawn and resolute; she places you in my arms. It is time, and when we say goodbye, the hospital door cannot contain the keening -as if one hundred sailors had been lost at sea. I am dizzy with the confusion of relief and remorse. Driving you home, my eyes dodge between the rearview mirror and you, my newborn baby. Will there be flashing lights and sirens? Nobody told me that adopting would feel so much like stealing.

Read on Five Minute Lit

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