Stuttering and craft
I came across a quote about cartoonist Glen Baxter who recently passed:
“An autodidactic spirit was fostered by his stammer. It made him dwell upon words, and their substitutes, and this would inform his captions’ idiosyncratic vocabulary. As he recalled, ’you can’t ask the grocer “Can I have some oranges?“ because you’re going to immediately hit the word c-c-can, so you say, “Good morning, have you any oranges?” Of course the shop’s full of oranges — who is this idiot? — so you’re in the position of being slightly mad and also there’s this fear involved. This childhood fear means I tinker with sentences until I’ve got them just about right.”
This immediately reminded me of a nugget about novelist Maggie O'Farrell, of Hamnet fame. In a discussion on The Book Club podcast, the 2 hosts mentioned that Maggie O’Farrell credits her childhood stammer with her becoming a writer as she constantly avoided words she had trouble with by finding different ways of expressing herself: phrasing, synonyms etc. As she said in a Guardian interview:
Having a stammer has been the single most defining experience of my life. It’s a crippling and agonising affliction, especially if you happen to be a teenager, but I’m certain it was instrumental in making me a writer. Watching words flow from your pen, unchecked, feels like a magic trick to someone who can’t rely on their verbal fluency.
2 artists who struggled with conveying themselves through the spoken word. Yet 2 artists who found their voices not in spite of, but because of their struggles. Now what does that say about the capacity for humanity to turn its obstacles into opportunities?