Josh Compton

I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my voice. I’m a stutterer, and I’m a speech professor.

Much of my stutter is covert, from over forty years’ practice of creative ways to avoid blocks and elongations and repetitions. I glide into a quick word substitution, or I linger for a second or two of strategic silence. And as a result, I usually pass as fluent—so well, even, that I won scores of awards for public speaking and debate in college. And now I’m regularly invited to give talks about my research for academic and community events. I teach a popular public speaking course with a wait list that regularly doubles and triples the number of available seats in my class. My stutter is not obvious to most people. I sound pretty fluent, usually.

But Dysfluent—an independent magazine supported by the Irish Stammering Association and the British Stammering Association / STAMMA and created by Conor Foran and Bart Rzeznik—challenges the idea that passing as fluent is the only worthy metric for a good voice. I see this magazine as a sort of celebration of stammering, of stuttering as a different way of communicating. Its essays and interviews give space to the stuttering voice—and more than just space. A platform and a spotlight and applause.