Proud Stutter

Maya revisits a listener favorite featuring choir clinicians Benedict and Talia, a husband-and-wife team who share powerful lessons about communication and empathy. Talia offers three practical tips for being a better listener to someone who stutters, starting with her first insight: “Fear is first.” She explains that fear is our natural initial response to new situations, and recognizing that helps us create calmer, more compassionate conversations.

Listen to the full interview to hear Talia’s other two insights, and how she and Benedict model true partnership, humor, and presence in every interaction.

In this episode

Maya sits down with Jerry Slaff, a playwright and and a writer who stutters, for a conversation about voice, craft, and the lifelong arc from fear to freedom. Jerry first reached out to Proud Stutter back in December 2021, writing, “once a stutterer, always a stutterer… if people don’t like my speech, that’s their problem.” We revisit that email and trace how age, practice, and community reshaped his relationship to speaking, onstage, at work, and in everyday life.

Jerry reflects on building a career that demanded communication, from press briefings, talkbacks, to cold reads, and how stuttering shows up differently across contexts (ease during prepared talkbacks vs. blocks in table reads). We explore his love of radio storytelling, the writers who formed his ear for dialogue, and his new creative chapters: a two-hander play set in 1950s America and a novel that includes a 12-year-old character who stutters. Along the way, we talk representation (what lands, what harms), allyship across disability communities, and the simple rule that guides him now: “Not caring is a great freedom.”

Mentioned

Maya sits down with Ina Lalich, a San Francisco–raised, multilingual woman who stutters, for a conversation about language, identity, and learning to take up space. Ina describes growing up between Serbian/Croatian and English (with a later detour through French), and how her fluency shifted across languages over time -- sometimes finding relief in Belgrade, later feeling the opposite. She talks about the “different mind” each language gives her, and how writing her college essay on stuttering helped her claim it as strength: creativity, precision, and deep empathy.

Now a user researcher at Quizlet who records herself for work, Ina shares what it’s like to interview strangers daily, rewind the tapes, and still choose presence over perfection. We hear candid stories --from a CEO mistaking a block for a bad internet connection to educating someone who mimicked her speech -- and the simple rule that guides her: if she stays calm, others learn to, too. The episode explores womanhood and stuttering, resisting infantilization, the “good pain vs. injury pain” metaphor she borrows from gymnastics, and a curiosity about ASL as another doorway into voice and belonging.

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Filmmaker and stuttering ally Andy Phillips joins Maya to mark the 10-year anniversary of his short film WORDS, a story born from two loves: New Orleans and spoken-word poetry. Andy shares how a friend who stutters, late-night script pages in a dreaded Shakespeare class, and a chance connection to a Lower Ninth Ward community center shaped the film’s heartbeat. A tour with neighborhood elder “Mr. Robert,” the Katrina watermark still visible on walls, inspired the opening poem and grounded the story in place and resilience. Andy also talks about researching stuttering to avoid tired stereotypes and building an indie crew through tiny miracles that kept showing up, sometimes literally with a Steadicam. A decade later, WORDS still ripples through his life, even guiding his path into podcast producing.

Dr. Dillon Pruett has lived both sides of stuttering: the anxious kid rehearsing every word and the scientist searching DNA for answers. His groundbreaking research, recently published in Nature Genetics, uncovered 57 genetic hotspots tied to stuttering -- proof that our voices carry a biological story as complex as any human trait. In our conversation, Dillon shares how his personal journey shaped his path into research, what the findings reveal about stuttering’s overlap with traits like musicality and sleep, and why the goal isn’t to “fix” stuttering but to demystify it. At its heart, this episode is about turning stigma into science and science back into compassion.