Billie Travalini: A Writer on a Mission
From The Pen Woman, Fall 2018
By Mary Lou Griffin, Diamond State Branch President
Billie Travalini has been an active letters member of the Diamond State Branch since 2008. She is a teacher and an internationally known writer and speaker.
“Life is good,” she says, and quickly adds that good does not always equate to easy.
At 12, Travalini was an abused child at the hands of her father. At 14, her father made good on his promise to put her “away,” in her words, “to keep family secrets secret.”
From 1948 to 1983, the Governor Bacon Health Center was where the State of Delaware placed its unwanted children: children with cerebral palsy, autism, hemophilia, foster kids with no homes, many with emotional or intellectual challenges. She was placed in Governor Bacon — at that time, she was unable to walk and was later diagnosed with lupus and juvenile rheumatoid arthritis.
She feels that she became one of the thousands of voiceless kids housed at Governor Bacon. This is a lot to overcome, but Travalini did just that.
“When what you can’t do is staring you in the eyes, you have to put something, anything in its place,” she says.
For Billie Travalini, that something was writing.
In her award-winning memoir, “Blood Sisters,” she wrote about her childhood.
“It may seem odd, but I always loved humor,” Travalini says. “At Governor Bacon, I met kids with no voice and no hope and I did what I could to make them smile, to make them believe change is possible.”
It was there she realized the need for each of us to have a voice — to matter. In the stories of others, Travalini found purpose. In their stories, she learned to be thankful for little things: the sun in the morning, an unexpected smile.
“Everyone is different, that’s all,” she says. “This is what I want every American to know: Each of us has a story.”
Travalini received the 2014 Governor’s Award for the Arts, Education, and a Delaware Division of the Arts Fellowship (professional) in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. She has read her work at universities in China, Austria, Spain, and Ireland. She recently returned home from her invitation to read at the University of Lisbon.
Her most-recent stories have been published in The Moth, Another Chicago Magazine, Gargoyle, The Lakeview International Journal of Literature, and An Encounter in the Global (Chinese and English).
Despite her professional accomplishments, Travalini feels her mission is to give voice to those who have no voice.
“I want to increase public awareness and rattle the collective conscious of elected officials to think as much about Delaware’s vulnerable citizens as much as they think about wealthy donors,” she says. “In art, we feel the past and we realize, once again, that rebranding the past doesn’t work because eventually, those who have been left out of the conversation will be heard. My greatest fear is not that I am a pain in the ass to those who resist change; my greatest fear is that I am not a big enough pain.”
Travalini is the current letters chair for the Diamond State Branch, and is a Delaware State juror for the Scholastic Student Writers Competition that the Diamond State Branch facilitates for the State of Delaware. She has also co-founded and coordinates The Lewes Creative Writing Conference, now in its 11th year; teaches writing at Wilmington University; and is busy at work writing “Rules to Survive Childhood,” a sequel to “Blood Sisters,” and “Rush Limbaugh and the French Apple Pie and Other Stories.”