About the Author: Lars-Petter Sveen, author and librarian. Bord 1981 in Fræna on the northwest coast of Norway, living in Oslo, married with three children. He has published a number of books, but the book now released is different. His book “Kunsten å stamme –  uten at noen merker det” [ “The Art of Stammering – Without Anyone Noticing” ] was released on August 29. The author will participate and tell about his book at the Autumn Weekend arranged by The Norwegian Stuttering and Cluttering Association October 21-23 2022.

All my life I have tried to hide my stutter, and I have been doing it quite well. Every time I was on a stage, talking about one of my books or interviewing another author, I got nervous. But I always thought that was how it was supposed to be – everyone gets the shakes and sweats when they are going to talk to a room full of people. 

But last year, on a stage in Oslo, I passed out. The words got stuck in my mouth, I lost control of the situation, and everything went black. When I came to myself, backstage in a chair, the first thought going through my head was: Did I stutter?

The week after I suffered an anxiety attack, and slowly I started to tell myself: I can no longer continue living this way. I stutter, there is no use in hiding it anymore. 

This may sound like an easy thing to grasp. And I would have liked to tell you that it all went well. But still I have trouble admitting to other people that I stutter, and still I have trouble letting myself stutter. 

In August a book I wrote, called “The Art of Stuttering – Without Anyone Noticing”, was published in Norway. Oh my, did I have trouble sleeping when the news broke that I had written this book. It felt as if I betrayed everything I had been doing my whole life – mastering my craft in talking like a normal person. Now, for the first time in my life, I was going to talk the way I have always tried not to talk. 

To my surprise it does not come easy. Every time the words get stuck, my whole body reacts: I jerk my head, tighten my chest, close my eyes, and instead of letting the stutter just happen, I press on till the words come out. But sometimes, like last week, when I was presenting my book in front of an audience of booksellers, I managed to let everything go. I did stutter, more than I have on a stage for many years, and to my surprise, it was a good experience. My body relaxed, and I managed to talk without thinking about changing out the words or editing my own speech. It felt as a big victory.

Now I must tell you that we do not talk much about stuttering here in Norway. In fact, there exists almost no books about stuttering and the public knows little about what stuttering means for those of us who stutter. This became obvious when one of the big newspapers in Norway made fun of both me and my book. The critic wrote that I did not stutter enough to write or talk about stuttering. 

The article kept me awake at night, because at first I thought it was correct: I did not stutter enough to write or talk about it. But then again, if I was not allowed to talk about the way I stutter, what should I then do? Keep shutting up about it? Keep passing out on stage? And what about other people who have a covert stutter, should they too shut up?

I did in fact write an essay that the same newspaper printed the following week, where I defended my right to stutter just the way I stutter. It may sound like a strange thing to argue about. But it might serve as an example on why we never must stop talking about stuttering. All my life I have tried to hide my stutter, and now, when I finally managed to talk about it, I got told I should keep quiet. With all my heart I do believe that everyone who stutters is different. This is not just the case when we talk about open and covert stuttering, it is also the case when we try to tell our story about our stutter. Before I dared to talk about, and seek help for, my stutter, I could not stand to see or hear other people who stuttered. If I saw someone, I left the room. If I heard someone, I turned off the radio or television. When a colleague in the newspaper where I worked showed me John Hendrickson’s interview with Joe Biden, published in The Atlantic, I excused myself and hid in the toilet. 

Now everything is different. When I now meet someone else who stutters , it is as if I have met an old friend, someone who understands who I am. I know this is not how it really is, but it is how I feel, and it is a beautiful feeling. It is a feeling of belonging, of being a part of something I am no longer ashamed of. 

It took me forty years to admit to myself that I stutter. It will probably take the rest of my life to learn to live with the art of stuttering, and I will probably have days where I hate every ounce of my stutter. And I will probably still have to read about critics who make fun of the way I talk and stutter. But I cannot give up, I cannot go back to hiding it. If I did, I would probably end up exhausted, sick, and mentally broke. Instead I have to talk the way I have never dared to talk: I have to stutter.