Laurie Cohen Obituary

After 11 years of managing the internet for an independent grocery chain and then for a popular print magazine, and 12 years of writing a semi-historical story of my own creation, I won’t be missed.

When my daughter was barely one year old, my editor at Fast Company, Liz Smith, invited me to give a keynote presentation about my role in a family-owned small magazine called The Chronicle. We’d run the same material we’d run under The Chronicle for the last 15 years—and I can say that I greatly enjoyed the role, despite some aspects of my new life.

I think of all of the reasons I was brought on board, the people I now work with every day, the stories I will no longer see, all the memories I’ll miss, and I try to imagine where I would be today if someone else had directed the ship. Still, my thoughts stray back to the people I feel I am starting to get to know better at this point.

I graduated from Davidson College with a degree in English, and I still think of myself as a member of the Davidson College faculty—it’s a place where I can learn, where I can come to the biggest and most sophisticated discussion in American literature and culture, and I can contribute there, as much as I can at The Chronicle.

We were all surprised and delighted yesterday afternoon to learn that Laurier has agreed to be a visiting fellow at the Thomas Merton Seminary in Budapest. I try to travel here as widely as possible, to write work of my own kind, to meet new people, to speak even though in the olden days people came to visit and I sometimes felt it was my obligation.

I was the only one in the room for Laurier’s presentation, the only one from the beginning who looked the least bit nervous, the only one who wore a tie, although I think it was pink. She looked uncomfortable with the room full of people, not just the assembled faculty. She speaks with more self-awareness than most people I know, and unlike me she knows when to keep her mike and your arms at her sides. She said she had a good career in journalism, but she also told a lot of the stories that are very different from what you might have expected to hear on Sunday morning.