Curating Connection Through the Art of Vulnerability: A Conversation with Stevie Billow

Shenandoah intern Kaia Beddows sits down with nonfiction editorial fellow Stevie Billow for a conversation about their writing journey, creative inspirations, and the curation behind the essays featured in Shenandoah’s 75th anniversary edition.

Beddows: In introducing yourself as one of Shenandoah’s editorial fellows in nonfiction, you mention entering the position “with a strong sense of imposter syndrome.” Do you have any strategies for combatting feelings of inadequacy or struggling with identity?

Billow: I think that I want people to feel comfortable being vulnerable in a writing space, and if I can’t be vulnerable myself, how can I expect people to be vulnerable with me? I just have to remind myself of that. Everybody is scared, ultimately. We just have to trust each other, even if we’re complete strangers. You never know who’s going to be reading what you write!

When curating essays on Language and Identity, how did you prioritize what you looked for? Did they all make you feel a certain way or did they offer vastly different perspectives on existence?

We had hundreds of submissions to that open call. I came from a place of really thinking about gender. That’s one of the big ways that I think about my relationship with language. When I was doing my master’s thesis in teaching, it was actually on grammatical gender and sociocultural gender, and how we build inclusive classrooms for gender-diverse students, while also acknowledging these very real aspects of gender that are ingrained in us. I went into this expecting to see a few pieces on that subject and I really didn’t at all! Just the sheer breadth of essays was really mind-boggling to me. It makes sense because we all have a relationship with language that is incredibly specific to ourselves.

I think what I was looking for was both a sense of honesty, something that surprised me, and the more that I read, the more I was considering what pieces spoke to one another. For example, Danielle’s piece and Alexis’ piece are both about language learning. Alexis is writing about learning to read throughout her life, and what that means for this legacy of black folks and language, using reading as a means of resilience. Meanwhile, Danielle is also talking about learning from a textbook written by a white man and it was so fascinating.

They were coming from very different places but both talking about language learning as a means of community maintenance and care. I thought that was really special because they didn’t know each other until Shenandoah! Similarly, with Anaya and Flavia’s pieces, it felt like both of them spoke to the embodiment of language. Those four pieces were so interconnected, but content-wise, it might be hard to see that at first glance. It really wasn’t until my second or third read-through of all of these submissions that I thought these belonged together in a curation.

How did you hear about Shenandoah’s fellowship?

From Galleyway on Instagram, I love that account. Shout-out to Camille Wanliss, founder of Galleyway, because it is a fantastically curated selection of opportunities for writers. She also made a post for my open-call which was really special. Definitely follow them on Instagram if you’re looking for opportunities!

When looking at your website, you call attention to queer literature. How do you believe storytelling impacts the LGBTQ+ community and how do you craft your reading lists?
I think actual recorded literature, whether it be written down or auditory, is such an important testament to the experience of any community or individual. Literature is a guide and teacher for us moving forward. It is so important to have these records of queer life, especially now that I feel like those records are being directly attacked and stripped from the archives on a systemic level. This has been an ongoing problem throughout a lot of human history but it’s definitely resurging right now in vigor.

Literature, whether it be fiction or nonfiction, is ultimately an archive, and I think it’s important to protect those archives for the future, but also to learn from them, and hold them dear to our hearts now while we still have access to them. Right now, I’m a bookseller. Since becoming a bookseller, my reading has become a lot broader. I’ve definitely branched out into some genres I didn’t anticipate branching into. I’ve always called to something that is going to leave me with more questions than answers, ultimately. I love a little bit of introspection, I can’t help myself! Books that challenge me, things that are from perspectives that I had no idea about prior to reading them, I think are really powerful, engaging, and important for me to read as a growing person.

How do you creatively implement the intersections of writing with your undergraduate degree in history and art history? Do you see Rotary Arts as a product of your cultivated interests?

Definitely. I certainly see Rotary as a way for me to engage with other artistic mediums beyond writing. As an art history major, you engage with art in such an abstracted and cryptic way, this deeply analytical way as well. Sometimes I think that when you get too analytical or too academic with art, you lose the humanity of it. Art-making, especially with friends and community, really reminds me of why art is important on a spiritual level for humans and I appreciate that a lot.

Can you talk briefly about the challenges or setbacks you faced when founding Rotary Arts?

That started back in 2021 or 2022. We were still really reeling from the pandemic and we were feeling very isolated. I had just graduated with a master’s degree in international education and lost the job and study abroad. I think I wasn’t the only person in my age group feeling very adrift and lost because of the pandemic and it really started as a means of continuing to make art, whether it be writing, music, visual art, despite how unmoored we all felt at the time. That was a struggle initially to get myself and six of my friends on board to build this accountability group, essentially. As time has progressed it has just become a part of all of our lives and the more people join it, there’s over twenty members now, it feels like we’ve gotten to a point where we just accepted that art is a part of us. We shouldn’t be doing that in isolation, we should be celebrating that together, and that was a hard place to get to when nobody felt together!

Would you mind sharing your process in writing something as elaborately vulnerable as "How Subcutaneous?"
I wrote that one a while ago! Not only shout-out to my mom but shout-out to a lot of people in my life who I feel close to but don’t know much about. That feels painful at times just because I think that it is such a gift to be able to be 100% unfiltered, yourself, with somebody else. I would love to be able to peel back the protective layers, these shields, of certain people in my life just so that I can hold them closer and help them feel seen.

"Saguaro" exhibits incredibly poetic and vivid vocabulary. It was a quick yet beautifully immersive read. How do you get inspired to write? Do you have specific locations that allow your creativity to thrive?
I usually feel rooted in some kind of feeling first that I want to extrapolate upon or spend extended time with in a piece of writing. Sometimes that feeling is fleeting, maybe it’s just observing something in the world, something that really is awe-inspiring. Or, sometimes, it’s a memory from childhood or an image of something that really evokes a particular emotion. With "Saguaro" especially, it started with the image of the tent in the backyard that I remember having
growing up and the feeling of losing bits of childhood. What mementos do we keep, like baby teeth, to try to tether ourselves to that time?

Since you helped piece together the 75th anniversary issue, what has been the most exciting part of working for Shenandoah? What did you learn about yourself?
Well, I was an editorial fellow for about a year, so it was really a long amount of time and it was so fascinating to see the back-end of the literary magazine process for the first time. As somebody who has submitted into the void of Submittable and waiting for the rejection notice, basically, it really humanized the whole process for me. It really did make me realize that, first off, rejections genuinely are not personal and, so often, the editor rejecting you actually does love your piece. I mean, people have told me that before, but I never believed it was true until I was doing it myself! So, as a writer, I think that is one of my biggest lessons.

The competition of writing is really kind of an illusion, we really are all in it together, and I genuinely think that we’re all trying to help each other succeed. That has been a really useful thing to learn and keep in my back pocket as a writer. As a person, I’m so grateful for all those pieces that I read. They were absolutely perspective-expanding in every way. They really encouraged me to dig deeper into my own relationship with language. I’m hoping to write for The Peak about this. During this year, as a fellow, I finally decided to look into my paternal family, who I’m estranged from, but I remember growing up, they spoke a different language at home. It was very confusing for me because they were not always very straightforward about what language it was. I determined that it was a Slavic language but trying to translate it, it never matched up with anything. I just kind of accepted that and I never thought I would do anything about it.

But, I think editing these pieces and reading so many essays about personal relationships with language, encouraged me to pick that up again and figure out what it is. I discovered it is an actual endangered language from a little ethnic minority in the Carpathian Mountains. It’s wild that it was just part of my life once, a part of my everyday life that I had lost and tricked myself into thinking that it wasn’t important at all. Separate from how this experience has changed me as a writer and an editor, as a person, I think it’s forced me to face parts of my history and face parts of myself that I’ve been afraid to deal with for years. That has been a really healing experience.