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From: Russ Hicks
Date: 04 Oct 2010
Time: 01:32:11 -0500
Remote Name: 72.64.101.29
Hi Hannah, Wonderful paper on covert stuttering! Boy I KNOW what challenges are for covert stutterers. I'm definitely OVERT, and it's really not much of a challenge for me to be open about my stuttering. I stutter 500 times a day, so it's really no big deal for me. But I know many covert stutterers (Cathy Olish, Sarah Watson Bell, Lisette Wesseling, and many others) and I know the agony they face every day when they even THINK they are going to stutter maybe once a day. It totally controls their lives. Overt and covert stutterers face very different problems even if we both "stutter." Covert stuttering is a terribly difficult concept to grasp by anyone who is not covert. That's why the Covert-S list is so supportive. People on that list really do understand! ... I wrote a paper on the Iceberg Analogy of Stuttering in 2003 that I believe helped pave the way for increased understanding of covert stuttering. It's the DENSITY of the iceberg! See http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/isad6/papers/hicks6.html if you want to read that article. At about that same time, Cathy Olish and I (and a couple of other people) produced the first "Covert Stuttering Exposed" workshop at the NSA conference in Boston in 2001. And it remains one of the most popular attended NSA workshops to this day. ... I hope you will be able to attend the NSA conference in Ft. Worth, Texas, this coming summer! .... Russ