Thursday, September 26, 2013

Essay by Katherine Preston, Author of "Out With It"

Check out this link to a very moving essay by Katherine Preston, author of the book Out with It: How Stuttering Helped Me Find My Voice. The essay is about her experience promoting her book and having to speak publicly as a stutterer. Here's an excerpt:
I watch my audience obsessively when I speak. I watch them laugh, and cry, I see people nod their heads fervently and whisper unheard asides to their friends nearby. The times that I have stuttered the most I have been met with steady eyes and standing ovations. My habitual reaction is to yearn for fluency, and yet the times that I’ve stuttered the least have resulted in yawns and the bored tapping of fingers on blue screens. I have realized that people want to see the “character” of my book up on stage. They want to see stuttering, to feel its curious intensity. I want that too. I want to acknowledge that stuttering exists, that it is nothing to be frightened of. I want to use the candid truthfulness of my speeches to build bridges between us. I aspire to give them what they want, and yet I also crave the rhythmic seduction of language that I find much easier to create on the page. I slip back into my habitual wish to control the atmosphere created by my words.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

September 9 Meeting Update

The meeting began with a reading of the Welcoming Words, followed by introductions.

The group then did an exercise in structured communication, using the sentence: "I went to the beach and saw...." followed by a word beginning with the first letter of the alphabet, then the second, and so on.

A reading from a letter written by a former group member followed, and a discussion about the group member's stuttering challenges and how she overcame them.

Then we had a discussion about speaking at work, how the work environment affects fluency, and at school, especially when everyone goes around introducing themselves. A group member talked about using fluency techniques (pausing and continuous phonation) successfully when his turn came.

The group did more reading aloud, this time from plays. The goal was to practice any techniques  to achieve fluency, regardless of how it made people sound. Everyone did great really taking their time and sticking with a plan.

Finally, we had a Q&A session with speech and language pathology students.

by Matt

Monday, September 2, 2013

A Video Game Character Who Stutters

The game Borderlands 2 is getting well-deserved praise for the diversity of its characters. One of them is Karima, who stutters. The game developer talks about how and why he created this character:

"Karima stutters purely because, while you never meet her in person, we needed to give the player some sense that Hyperion’s presence had harmed her in some way. Giving her a stutter made her affliction clear, and allowed for an easy way to show the player’s actions had meaning – after the first mission, she no longer stutters. Nobody comments on it or mocks her for it because it honestly never occurred to me. In fact, the only mockery Karima receives are gendered insults from a misogynist named Dave, who ends the quest by dying violently (because, like the bandits Ellie crushes to death, I take great pleasure in making bigots and sexists pay for their douchery).

"After reading [an] email [from a player who is a stutterer, see below], however, I can say with some certainty that if Karima ever shows up again, she will have her stutter back – permanently – and we will continue to write her exactly as we did before. The knowledge that something we did (however unintentionally) touched someone in this kind of personal way is, to say the least, pretty damned great. This email showed me the power of inclusivity in all of its forms."

Player's e-mail: 

I was playing Borderlands 2 today when I came across the NPC Karima in the medicine man mission. At first I was a bit angry she had a stutter –I was hit in the head with shrapnel from an IED in al-anbar Iraq and have problems talking – because the stereotypes surrounding stutterers are not kind. Communication is one of the defining pieces of humanity and when you cannot communicate to those around you, they tend to view you as lesser. I can’t tell my daughter I love her without struggling through those 3 little words. I quickly realized the mission was written such and clearly illustrated just how evil Hyperion is. She was a very sympathetic character. Whoever wrote this went 180 degrees away from what I thought was going to happen in this case. Thank you. In a game where bat shit craziness is the norm – the writers injected a very subtle bit of humanity. For whatever reason, this really struck me. Thank you for taking the high road here. You skipped over cheap laughs here and in so doing made a big impact. Thank you.

Read more about the game and its characters here.