a short memoir by Brett Garcia Rose

Here are the rules: You must begin every sentence or phrase with a vowel. Any word beginning with a consonant is considered high risk and must be preceded without pause by a vowel ending in a higher tonality. This is the roller-coaster. The letters M, B, G and V are especially troublesome. Avoid them, substitute with words beginning in a Z or TH or another soft consonant where possible (hint: you can get away simple letter substitution within a word if you fake a yawn or hiccup), but if you need to use them you will always and carefully place them towards the end of the sentence, when you are out of breath and have the necessary speed and force to break through. This is the run. You can never use words that begin with T, S, Y or a hard C, and you can never use any word containing an audible W or a soft U. These sounds are unavailable to you. Find alternatives.

Now construct a paragraph describing what you did today. You have two minutes.

A stutterer learns to do this at five years old. By the time we reach nine we can do it in around half a second. At 12 we have the mental equivalent of a college-level thesaurus and will often use three or four syllable words or entire phrases in place of a single word containing a letter we cannot use. A common example is for us to say ‘I’d prefer not to agree at the moment,’ instead of a simple ‘no,’ if the word stutters in the internal rehearsal that takes place in the moments prior to verbalizing.

We speak the way writers write, and we edit in real time. And even though the lag lessens with time and practice, a stutterer will likely go his or her entire life without ever having a real conversation. We are three steps ahead of ourselves at all times. We cannot enjoy the present because you can’t bear the silence. We love and fear and respect language in way the fluents could never imagine. We think in words, not images, because we are necessarily obsessed with the delivery of our thoughts more so than their contents, and we are so preoccupied with our verbal puzzles that there is no room for anything else. And although we may only speak 30 or 40 words in a given week, we have a constant stream of dialogue running through our minds. Life, for us, is an ongoing rehearsal…

Like so many others, I began writing out of despair and a sense of disconnectedness from the world, out of loneliness and fantasy. In my writing I was fluid and fluent, I could be charming or terrifying or wise. In my writing I had friends and purpose and value. I was someone to talk to, someone to love. In my writing, I discovered myself. In discovering myself, I came to know the world.

This is an excerpt from a personal essay by Brett Garcia Rose. Read this story in its entirety, along with weekly exclusive content from Fiction Attic, when you subscribe to Fiction Attic Press through Beacon.

Not ready to subscribe? Download this story now. [purchase_link id=”864″ style=”button” color=”green” text=”Get the story.” direct=”true”]

Brett Garcia Rose is a software entrepreneur, fiction writer, former animal rights soldier and stutterer. His work can be found in literary and consumer publications around the world, including Sunday Newsday Magazine, The Barcelona Review, Opium, Lit Up, Rose and Thorn, The Battered Suitcase and others. Awards/nominations include the Million Writer’s Award, Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and Opium’s Bookmark competition. His first novel, Noise, will be available in Summer 2014.

Would you like to see your work here? Submit to our Creative Nonfiction Contest.

Why we chose it: In “The Spoken World,” Rose describes with clarity and grace what it is like to grow up as a stutterer. He invites the reader into the stutterer’s world, a world in which simple everyday interactions must be navigated with a kind of linguistic gymnastics that most of us never have to consider. He goes on to reveal how his life as a stutterer led him to become a writer, and how, ultimately, sharing his writing with an audience helped to speak without a stutter. The memoir is poignant, surprising, beautifully detailed, and very revealing.