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.

Starting in December of 2011 and stretching on for the entire year of 2012, I had a different plan for my involvement at Sophia Ballou. I posted a complete chapbook every month on the 15^th. On the first I posted a critical preface to the work that would be posted two weeks later. In short, I spent the whole month, each month, writing or assembling or editing or a combination of the three, a fifty page chapbook. It was a tremendous time, certainly. Also, 2012 was a benchmark year for me. That year, I paid off my grad school loans. This was a big deal to me at the time, but looking back on it, I had started grad school in 2007, graduated in 2009, so these loans were not very old. My first novel was published in September of 2012. I was sober for the entire year. And most importantly, my son was born in August. If anything was a profound game changer it was his birth.

In 2013, I began a project called Coppertown. In way this story was how I was dealing with the inevitable exodus from Oregon and the sad return to Colorado. Coppertown, was a Colorado set of stories. In 2015, I finished these stories as a completed novel.

In 2014, at least for the first four months, The Sophia Ballou Project was slowing down. There had been a certain break neck speed that the project had been seeing. By the final four months, I ran individual poems weekly. Most of the poems became my chapbook Cockroaches and Geese, which was published through the Writer's Coop at Umbrella Factory Magazine.

The Sophia Ballou Project was a collective of about a half a dozen writers. For me, reading the posts of the other writers was an awesome beginning of my daily work sessions. Inspiring. Great. Collective. What more would a writer want than to be with a good group like this?

As the time for this project began to run down, I was of course, very sad. But all things have their time. And should the fine people at Sophia Ballou decide to start up again, I would be honored should I be invited back. My participation from January 2011 until the conclusion of it in April of 2014 was one of the greatest highlights of my writer's life.