Opinion | How creativity can start with a stutter

Jane Fraser
Guest columnist
Kendrick Lamar performs with SZA during the 2018 Coachella Valley Music And Arts Festival at the Empire Polo Field on April 13, 2018 in Indio, California.

Have you ever been speechless? Wanted to say something but the words just wouldn’t come out?

It can be an unnerving feeling at the best of times, and for the 76 million people worldwide and some three million Americans who stutter, it can be a frightening daily obstacle.

Three million Americans; that’s more than the populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, and Washington, D.C. combined. Odds are that you know someone, a relative, a friend, or maybe a coworker who stutters.

National Stuttering Awareness Week begins Monday, May 7, and it’s important to recognize just how important creativity is to people who stutter.

Brilliant people like Tim Gunn, Steve Harvey, James Earl Jones, former Vice President Joe Biden, Lewis C. Carroll, Winston Churchill, and Shaquille O’Neil have led wildly successful lives despite but most importantly because of their Stutter.

Lewis C. Carroll, the pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in 1832, was a mathematician, a logician, an Anglican deacon and a photographer. His most notable literary work was "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland."

Biographer John Pudney expressed in "Lewis Carroll and his World" how Carroll’s childlike fantasies were not only the spark for his creative genius but also brought him into a new world where stuttering did not exist.

"This ‘perfectly hard crystal’ containing childhood was his true essential life, expressed in the Alice books and in some poems," Pudney wrote. "When he spoke to these children, he lost his habitual stammer. He simply became one of them… This perennial childhood, together with the fantasy and poetry that sometimes expressed it, was his reality.”

Carroll is not the only person who tried to find a way to escape a stutter only to run into success.

Artists like Kendrick Lamar, Emily Blunt and Ed Sheeran all stuttered at one time or another in their lives. They have all credited their stutter with being a major contributing factor to their first interest in the arts.

Jane Fraser

Lamar, who just won a Pulitzer Prize, started his career with a love for poetry, instilled in him by his seventh-grade teacher. Lamar, like Carroll, used his creative expression to bypass his stutter.

In fact, within the stuttering community, the ability of persons who stutter to sing fluently is quite well documented. Famous singers Mel Tillis, Carly Simon, Bill Withers, B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Scatman John, Jason Gray, and Ann Wilson all struggled with fluency despite having award-winning singing voices.

So next time you come across someone who stutters, try not to assume anything about them – they could be the next Vice President of the United States or Pulitzer Prize winner.

Jane Fraser is president of The Stuttering Foundation, founded in Memphis by her father, Malcolm Fraser.