More about living with a stutter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Stuttering Foundation has an article from their Summer 2016 Newsletter about Mr. John Moore titled Stuttering and Public Speaking. It says:

 

“When speaking in public, John says there are two things he does at the beginning of every presentation. ‘I tell the audience two things about myself. First is my mantra: I take my job seriously, and myself lightly.’ And second, ‘I tell the audience that I stutter, and it will happen during this speech.’ “

 

There is a 13-minute TEDxSydney video from 

singer-songwriter Megan Washington on April 2014 titled Megan Washington: Why I live in mortal dread of public speaking.

 

At 7:54 she says that:

 

“Singing for me is sweet relief. It is the only time when I feel fluent. It is the only time when what comes out of my mouth is comprehensively exactly what I intended.”  

 

John Hendrickson wrote a long article titled What Joe Biden can’t bring himself to say in the January/February 2020 issue of The Atlantic. I blogged about it on April 18, 2020 in a post titled Joe Biden has a problem – he’s a mostly recovered stutterer. Then in 2023 there was a book by John Hendrickson titled Life on Delay – Making peace with a stutter. There is a 49-minute YouTube video interview of him from the Library of Congress [National Book Festival] titled Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter with John Hendrickson. Sometimes it’s painful to watch.  At ~ 7:20 he says:

 

“Because of all the gears that are constantly turning in your head as a person who stutters, all the word switching, all of it’s like you’re … I think of it as like you’re trying to get to the other part of one of those rotating logs. You’re just trying to get there, you know, to the other side. That’s what it’s like getting through sentences as a person who stutters. So, it takes a lot of energy and it takes a lot of focus and many people who stutter are constantly trying to avoid these moments of repetitions and prolongations and blocks and they’re putting in other words, things like that.”  

 

There also is an article with a 28-minute podcast of John by J. D. Gray at the ASHA Leader on January 4, 2024 titled ASHA Voices: Author John Hendrickson on Stuttering, Disclosure, and ‘Life on Delay.’ The article links to two previous podcasts about stuttering.

 

The image was adapted from this one at Openclipart.