May 4 | 7:00 to 8:00 pm
John Hendrickson is our special guest for the We Stutter Upstate online zoom May meeting (Thursday, May 4 @ 7pm).
John’s memoir,
LIFE ON DELAY: Making Peace with a Stutter, has caused significant ripples within the stuttering community and WAY BEYOND. We’ve talked lots about John Hendrickson before in our meetings and now we get to talk WITH him. This is a can’t miss meeting!!!!
Email John Moore for Zoom meeting details.
BOOK OVERVIEW
In LIFE ON DELAY, John Hendrickson writes candidly about bullying, substance abuse, depression, isolation, and other issues stutterers like him face daily. He explores the intricate family dynamics surrounding his own stutter and revisits key people from his past in unguarded interviews.
Readers get an over-the-shoulder view of his childhood; his career as a journalist, which once seemed impossible; and his search for a romantic partner. Along the way, Hendrickson guides us through the evolution of speech therapy, the controversial quest for a “magic pill” to end stuttering, and the burgeoning self-help movement within the stuttering community.
Beyond his own experiences, he shares portraits of fellow stutterers who have changed his life, and he writes about a pioneering doctor who is upending the field of speech therapy.
Articles & Interviews
The Atlantic — excerpt
The Atlantic magazine published an excerpt of LIFE ON DELAY. This 3,500 word excerpt, gives you a bite-size sample of John’s personal an informative perspective on stuttering.
If this excerpt is behind The Atlantic’s paywall, click here to download a PDF copy of the excerpt.
NPR Interview
MSNBC Interview
NEW YORK TIMES — opinion video
Filmmaker James Robinson explores the obstacles and emotional burden of John Hendrickson’s stutter and explains the coping strategies and workarounds he has devised to make it through the day in a world that demands that we speak up and speak clearly. The film suggests that the problem may lie not with people who stutter but with a society that is largely unprepared or disinclined to accommodate them.
ESQUIRE — interview
The first pages of John Hendrickson’s memoir, Life On Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter, set a scene: he’s in MSNBC’s green room, following publication of a story for The Atlantic that would ultimately change his life. “As I listened to the recording of our interview, I remembered how I used to respond when people asked me about my stutter. I’d shut down. I’d try to change the subject.”
USA TODAY — interview
For Hendrickson, the book-writing process meant ravenously reflecting on his own life, including his early days in speech therapy, his journalism career and all the familial, platonic and romantic relationships in his life – not to mention interviewing many fellow stutterers.
“They all changed my life in individual ways,” Hendrickson says over the phone. “The way I wrote the book was trying to let certain people who stutter help me illuminate and understand individual topics, from relationships to substance abuse, depression to creativity and art.”