The ILacqua Experiment

It should be no surprise that I would be involved with a project with a title like “The ILacqua Experiment.” It was something that my wife, Janice, wanted to do. It began on a chilly November day in 2015 in a cold coffeehouse in our town of Longmont, Colorado. Our young son was in his pre-school class and we had a little time to each other.

Over coffee, as I suspect so much of my life has been, we decided that we needed something to focus our energies on, a creative endeavor we could do together and independently. I suggested a blog.

Of course, as it was, I had only been away from The Sophia Ballou Project for about a year and I missed it terribly. So when I suggested a blog, I had in mind a place where the two of us could do what we wanted to do and get the feel good feedback from each other.

Initially, I did not have an idea about what I might like to write. So, as usual, I thought about something practical to write. What I came to was a memoir about my days working for the Boy Scouts of America. I felt like I had something to say about this time of my life. In late 2015, and to be written weekly in 2016, I would recall the years 1995 to 2000 as I worked from camp program director to a district executive. I felt like I would have an interesting perspective as I was not the typical Boy Scout.

It was also an opportunity for me to reconcile myself to that portion of my life. Until the time I begun to write this story, I harbored a great deal of guilt about who I was at that time, and how awful my actions were.

I completed my memoir on September 1, 2016. Although I feel like the memoir entitled A Scout is Brave was a success, I do not feel like the ILacqua Experiment was. I feel like as an experiment, it was a failure. Janice did not post very much. She wrote a few very lovely “mommy” posts. She attempted to revise her novel. But ultimately, the blog became almost solely my work. I wonder sometimes if I caused her lack of contribution because I was so prolific.

It did spur her to start her own blog, and that in itself was worth the price of admission.

Sophia Ballou

The Sophia Ballou Project ran from May of 2010 until April of 2014. I joined the project in January of 2011 and I remained a contributor until the end. It was just over three years I got the opportunity to be a part of that project and all the wonderful people there. It's funny that it was only three years, because in my mind, my involvement stretches on for decades, at least.

My first year, 2011, I posted my novel Sand and Asbestos in a serial form on Fridays. It was a weekly installment of about a thousand words. I used the opportunity to focus on my novel. I had started the story about a year or so prior to joining Sophia Ballou, but I was never able to truly focus on the novel until I committed to posting a chunk of it weekly.