About the Author: Catherine Moroney is a physicist and software engineer who has had a long career (30+ years) of studying the importance of clouds in the climate system by generating and analyzing satellite data, most of which has been spent at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (California Institute of Technology/NASA). Despite having lived a long time in the US, she considers Canada to be her home and is an alumnus and former staff member at both McGill University and University of Toronto. She has been active in the national and international stuttering communities since the early 1990s and has served on the CSA Board of Directors as Secretary from 2019, with no end date in sight.

Author’s Note:

This is the written text of the keynote speech which I gave at the recently concluded joint conference between the Canadian Stuttering Association (CSA) and Newfoundland Labrador Stuttering Association (NLSA) which was held in St. John’s Newfoundland August 21-23 2026. Therefore all references to “here” refer to this particular event.  Dr. Shenker refers to Dr. Rosalee Shenker, a Canadian Speech-Language Pathologist who has made her career in stuttering therapy, who was the other keynote speaker at this conference.  In a fit of coincidence, I was also her client for a brief period of time while living in Montreal in the late 1980s.

“Overcoming Stuttering when you can’t not Stutter”

I am not seeking to negate the definition of “overcoming” but instead to broaden it.  I know full well the almost inhuman effort required to permanently change your speech pattern and have the utmost respect for the people who have indeed done that and the therapists who helped them.

We all know the stories of esteemed people like Samuel Jackson, James Earl Jones and Joe Biden who are held up as paragons of success as “they used to stutter and now look/listen to them”.  What many people don’t see is the subtext that subliminally says “you need to stop stuttering first and only then can you succeed”.

 But, as the esteemed Dr. Shenker said to me in private conversation, some people will always stutter and for myself and others in that same situation we need to broaden what “success” means.  For many of us it now equates to saying what we want to say, when we want to say it, to the intended parties and being able to focus on the content of our words instead of the number of syllables stuttered while doing so.

I have had a memorable career (physicist and software engineer working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for 30+ years studying the role of clouds in climate change) holding my own against some of the brightest/most intimidating people on the planet (who had the unerring ability to sniff out a faint bit of BS buried in a mine shaft fifty miles away and would not hesitate to call you out in front of everyone) but by no means am I unique:  I personally know several people who REALLY stutter who are pastors, investigative journalists, sports journalists, etc and not many people outside this room realize the absolutely insane courage they display every day.

To quote the immortal Rolling Stones:  “instead of getting what you want, may you get what you need”.  While I was studying at McGill I decided one day to walk up the hill to Dr. Shenker’s office and just say “help me”.  I was seeking fluency, but having gained and then lost that thing I thought would “fix me”, I realize the true gift was finding my true (decidedly disfluent) voice and my community and having the ability to now give back to this same community.

This was in the pre-internet days so there was no way to google “stuttering support” and find help online.  I knew, theoretically, that I was not the only one, but until I entered speech therapy in my 20s I had never actually heard a “real live stutter” from another person’s mouth and then I really knew that I was indeed not alone.  I went through the old-school fluency shaping program and emerged with a completely different (and fluent) voice, only to lose all those gains within a few months.  That whiplash was brutal but the ultimate gains in terms of learning self-acceptance and finding my tribe only became clear to me over the following years.  Having finally experienced the freedom of just being able to speak, I was unwilling to let that go even when the temporary fluency that enabled that deserted me.  Then I learned about the entire community out there, and when I attended my first conference and found myself amongst hundreds of other people who stuttered:  everything really started to change.

We all know that it does indeed take a community.  I certainly did not become a rocket scientist all on my own.  I have been blessed with a loving and supportive family (my mother and brother are here right now), access to superb education, the knowledge to force people to look past my speech to the work I could do, a mentor who only cared about my newly minted physics degree instead of my speech and had the foresight to thrust me into the JPL spotlight instead of keeping me in the background as “Roger’s programmer”.  

I am so glad to see the community of people who stutter, the dedicated SLPs who treat (and learn) from us, and the medical community (a giant shout-out to Dr. Gerald Maguire, my doctor and close friend since 1997, who would have been here except for life intervening at the last moment) who are finally digging into the neurological differences between people who stutter and those who don’t and developing treatments based on that knowledge are beginning to work together.  We need to (a) understand the full complex reality of speech and how it can break down and (b) realize that every person needs individualized treatment.

Now onto some of the hard cold realities of having a severe stutter:  constantly being judged as nervous, stupid and crazy just for speaking differently, the curse of voicemail that says “tell me what you are calling about” and is then incapable of listening, and constantly being asked if someone needs to call 911.  My standard response is to call 911 if I STOP stuttering!  

But it is our choice how to react:  do we let these “slings and arrows of stuttering fortune” fester and eat us up from inside, or do we learn to cope with these?  I’m sure we all think about that “magic pill” that would “cure our speech”, particularly after a long hard day of dealing with impatient people and speech recognition systems trained only on fluent voices.  

To return to the example of famous people have overcome stuttering:  James Earl Jones (THE voice of our generation) said that even though he learned to speak without stuttering, it was always with him and one bad moment would “let the furies loose”.  It is not a choice to have a disability, but it is a choice to be disabled by it.

Dr. Shenker referred to the well-known Iceberg model in that 90% of stuttering lives beneath the surface and it is fitting to be here in Newfoundland which is known for its natural icebergs.

I wish to acknowledge all those people for whom words do not come easily, and the tenacity and courage that we all show in living our lives audibly and disfluently in a fluent world.   I, by most conventional definitions, have succeeded but I certainly did not need to stop stuttering in order to do so.  That is my message to everyone here who thinks they cannot do anything until they learn to speak like most people:  just go out and use your talents and passion to make your own mark in the world.  Fluency may not come but in the end, ask yourself, is it necessary?  

In closing, all I can say is that without having stuttered my life would be very different, but I cannot in any honesty,  as I stand here overwhelmed with the honour to be selected as a keynote speaker and having given this speech in my authentic and definitely unique voice, whilst surrounded by my family and my second family, say it would be better.