Stuttering pride is starting to mature. No longer a hushed whisper that might evaporate if spoken aloud, the social movement of stuttering pride has turned to root and flower. In this post I want to consider the growing stuttering community from the perspective of a gardener. Nietzsche, of all people, offers a starting point: “Woe to the thinker who is not the gardener but only the soil of the plants that grow in [her]!” (2012,  s.382). This advice is as true for a community as for an individual. Being gardeners of ourselves implies not only noticing the variety of life and the compositio ..read more

I have been a speech and language therapist for 30 years now working with people who stammer of all ages. I like the idea that everything I learned about stuttering and its therapy resembles a map. When I  listened to Sam Simpson’s keynote talk at the ECSF Symposium in Antwerp in 2020, it felt that this map had enlarged by a great amount of landmass that I had never been aware of nor travelled to before:  seeing the social model of disability applied to stuttering was a total game changer. For most of my professional career my residence on this imaginary stuttering map was on modific ..read more

I have grown up smothered by a veil of shame, too scared to speak or even open my mouth. My stammer was “crippling” or “disabling” and it defined every inch of my being and my experiences. There was not only a lack of pride (I never dreamt that pride and stammering could be used in the same sentence) but a deep-seated feeling of inferiority. At school and university, I was excused from oral exams and once again, everything was done to pathologise and silence the stammer. Suddenly, attending an event that not only was run for and by people who stutter but also dared to celebrate it was overwhel ..read more

In June 2023 I took part in the  50 Million Voices practice interview event;  an initiative that does so much to unlock the talent of people who stutter by tackling the barriers created by workplace interviews.  I’ve been involved with 50MV since meeting Iain Wilkie and Sam Simpson when I was a mentor on the first  Stambition  program run by Action for Stammering Children in 2021.  This time, as agreed with the organisers, I was participating for the first time as a person who clutters. Although I’ve been dysfluent all my life, I always sensed I wasn’t a person wh ..read more

What is the impact of childhood intervention on those who continue to stutter into adulthood? Many adults have shared their experiences in memoirs, on podcasts, in blogs, etc. and most of those experiences are stories of recovery – not from stuttering, but from the impact of earlier therapy. Parents can benefit from reading these accounts, but that’s a lot of searching and reading for a busy parent. My new book,  VoiceS Unearthed: The Impact of Childhood Intervention on Those Who Continue to Stutter, provides parents – as well as trainee and qualified speech and language therapists – a c ..read more

Something serendipitous has welled up in my PhD research. An unexpected connection has sparked and fused. This connection is all about time, or rather its disruption, through usurping societal expectations of chronological time. It spans between my research area and the creative approach. This connection is opening up possibilities for thinking creatively around disfluency. The Stories Beyond Words project brings together a group of people with diverse communication impairments to co-create immersive audio-visual installations. These artworks aim to challenge societal preconceptions about non ..read more

In Draft No 4, the great writer John McPhee describes how his English teacher insisted every piece of student writing began with a sketch of contents and structure. This is mine. In a few hundred words time, you can judge if I have kept to it. My English teacher was equally prescriptive but more prosaic: “define your terms”. So, here goes. Every third Tuesday, between September 2021 and January 2022, about a dozen of us met on zoom for an hour and a half. Some were people who stammered; others, speech and language professionals; some both; all of us keen to explore how we think and talk about ..read more

Models and Metaphors   Bit by bit, humans make models of the world to try and make sense of it. This is as true for disability as it is for astrophysics or evolutionary biology. In my contribution to Stammering Pride and Prejudice, I outlined just four ways that disability has been modeled: “a cosmic sign in the religious model, a biological pathology in the medical model, a social oppression in the social model, [and] a political relation in the aptly named political/relational model” (2019, 12). The way that we think about disability matters because – to indulge in medical language – ho ..read more

It’s an interesting time for therapists working with stammering.  Not always a comfortable seat at the table when we’re considering the social model of disability with questions about what’s useful and what’s unhelpful, even harmful, in our work, and when our laziest thinking and assumptions are challenged.  The online discussion group ‘Advanced Conversations in Stammering’ hosted by Sam Simpson and Patrick Campbell (Sept 2021-Jan 2022) was a safe space for stammerers and speech therapists to respond honestly and openly together to a range of ideas and perspectives curated by Sam and ..read more

‘Holding space’ means being fully present and curious with someone as they express their experiences, without judging or attempting to change them. In this blog post, I will explore why ‘holding space’ is so crucial in stammering therapy. How many times have you been speaking with someone about an experience or how you feel about something and the person listening to you shares their opinion, shares when they experienced something similar, gives advice to solve your problem, negates your feelings or deflects away from the story by changing the subject? This happens often in our fast paced worl ..read more