Becoming a Proud Stutterer

Joeita Gupta:
I'm Joeita Gupta, and this is The Pulse. Did I just stutter or what? Throwaway remarks like this one allude to negative stereotypes about stuttering. There is an entrenched perception that people who stutter are unintelligent and unable to communicate. Media portrayals depict stuttering as embarrassing and as something to overcome.
Traditionally, the solution has been to diagnose stuttering and make it disappear through intensive speech therapy. For people who stutter, this often means a lifetime of self-consciousness and fear of communicating. Ordering at a restaurant, or starting a conversation with a stranger become potential minefields.
But people who stutter are changing the conversation by creating safe spaces to embrace stuttering as part of linguistic diversity. Today, we discuss being a proud stutterer. It's time to put to your finger on the pulse. Hello and welcome to The Pulse on AMI Audio.
I'm Joeita Gupta and I'm coming to you today from the studios of Accessible Media in Toronto. You should see a background behind me with some lettering on it. And today, I'm wearing my hair and a bun as always, and I'm in a red sweater.
My guest today is Maya Chupkov, who is the creator of the podcast, Proud Stutter, as a woman who stutters, Maya is a stuttering advocate working to change social norms about stuttering. She joins us from San Francisco. Hi, Maya. Welcome to the program. It's great to have you with us.

Maya Chupkov:
Hello. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

Joeita Gupta:
I can't help but notice that it was something of an odd choice to go with the format of a podcast. Especially when one is a stutterer, it isn't intuitive. Why did you decide to go with a podcast?

Maya Chupkov:
I have wanted to do audio since I was very little, but more of broadcast journalism, so visual and audio. And yeah, I just always was so I wanted to get on the mic. That was just my urge ever since I was little. But my stuttering always held me back and made me think that I could never do it.
And as I started listening to podcast and learning about the industry, I realized that it's actually pretty easy to start a podcast, or at least I thought it was until I started it.
And there was just something so cool about doing an audio-only medium with a stutter because it just, it really just turns the whole medium on its head and really takes a stance that even if you don't have that smooth radio voice that a lot of people think you need to be on audio, I wanted to disrupt that so hard and be like, no, you can get on the mic too, even if you stutter.

Joeita Gupta:
Well, you sound great. I want to ask you though, were you always a proud stutterer or did it take time to grow into that identity?

Maya Chupkov:
I always thought my stutter was ugly. A lot of that comes from what you had mentioned earlier, the things I would see on TV and film. Every time I saw a stuttering character on screen, it was the butt of a joke. It was treated as something negative.
And so that really was traumatizing for me. As I started to do the podcast, I just started slowly, slowly reliving all these horrible memories that I've just kept really deep down. And so it's been a very healing journey. And yeah, so I would really go to great lengths to hide my stutter and to pass as fluent.
I did do speech therapy, which was very traumatic as well, but I kind of trained myself to be fluent my whole life, and it's been very exhausting. And now that I have the podcast, I'm really trying to untrain myself to just speak freely and not hold back as much as I've done my whole life.

Joeita Gupta:
I was listening to the episode, just the latest one where you have a bus driver in San Francisco with a stutter, and he said, "After listening to your podcast, either I started to stutter more because I wasn't as self-conscious about it and trying to hold back on the stutter or just noticing it more."
And I thought that was such a powerful thing to hear that people were starting to be comfortable in their own skin. You talk about healing, is that notion of healing or having a safe space where stuttering is normalized an opinion that's also shared by the guests who appear on your podcast? Do they feel better when they talk about it?

Maya Chupkov:
Oh yeah. Every time we do a podcast together, a lot of the times it's the first time the guest is speaking about their stutter or it's the first time they're speaking openly. And I've heard feedback from people that it's been the most freeing experience for themselves. And that is the whole point of Proud Stutter. It's just to create a platform for people to finally be able to share their voice.
And so it's, yeah, it's healing for me, but it's also very healing for my guests. And I think another thing that is healing about me is I've always hated my voice. I've always hated the sound of my voice. And now that I'm starting to edit my own podcast and listening to my voice all day long, now I am so comfortable with my voice and it's really transformed me. And now I'm just so much more just, yeah, I'm just able to not have that weight of being afraid of my voice anymore, which is incredible.

Joeita Gupta:
Yes. And what an interesting observation. I mean, I really struggle to listen to myself as well. When they would play back tape, I would sort of flinch as saying, "Is that really what I sound like to everybody?" So it's good to know that it's one of those things where it takes a bit of getting used to for everybody to get used to the sound of their own voice.
Tell me a little bit about some of the guests you've had on the show? You've had such a diversity of voices on the program. Who are some of the guests that have been most memorable, and how do you go about finding these great people to talk to?

Maya Chupkov:
Oh my gosh. Yeah, I love my guests so much. And so actually we just released an episode, it's Friday, October 7th today, and we just released an episode and it's such a special episode because it's with two of my friends, one of which I met who stutter.
She's a filmmaker. So talented. And she uses her experience growing up as a woman who stutters, someone that's biracial, someone that's grown up in the Bay Area, and she uses all of those experiences in her storytelling, so. And so I love that episode. And I am joined by one of my friends who's a newspaper columnist here.
He's a storyteller, and his name's Stuart Schuffman. It's just such a great episode and it's so fun to be able to invite friends on because it's just, I learn something new about them every time. And another person that I just am so in awe of is JJJJJerome Ellis, who's a musician. He's a poet.
He has an album out called The Clearing. And that album is all about his journey with stuttering and he weaves in philosophy and black history. It's just such a work of art. So yeah, those are just a few examples. We have a ton more. We have teachers, we have journalists, we have tech workers. It's just such a diverse cast of people. And how I find them, there isn't really a structure.
I just get this kind of, it's like an intuition of like, "Oh my God, I love this person's energy and I think they'd fit great." And my goal really with the show is to tell diverse stories. And so I want to invite people from different backgrounds, different race, different socioeconomic backgrounds.
I want to really just make the show as nuanced as possible, and also people with different forms of stuttering. So there's people that can hide it well like me, and then there's people that are more overt and it's more consistent. So I just try to follow my intuition and keep the show as diverse as possible.

Joeita Gupta:
But bearing in mind that there isn't a lot of dialogue about stuttering, and we still see these very limited media portrayals of stuttering, what does the inclusion of a diverse set of guests do to the overall conversation that you're trying to have to change some of those social norms about stuttering? In that, by saying not everyone who stutters is the same, how are you deepening the conversation and creating more nuance?

Maya Chupkov:
Yeah, that's such a good point because I've asked a lot of people who don't stutter this, and they're like... And I asked them, "When you hear the word stutter, what do you think of?" And a lot of the times they say the Billy Madison movie, The King speech, all these things. And I'm just like, "Okay. Yeah. So we have a lot of work to do."
And really the podcast is about deepening the understanding of stuttering. Stuttering can sound like me. And one of the most annoying responses I get when I tell someone I stutter is, "Oh, I don't... You've overcome it, right? I don't hear it." And I'm like, "No, no, no, no. I'm hiding it very well."
And sometimes I just have fluent days and sometimes I don't. And that is a very common experience among people who stutter is you might not hear it, but it's what underneath that is really where all of it lies, the shame, the analyzing everything before you say something.
And so that is what Proud Stutter is all about. It's about having these nuanced conversations so when people interact with people who stutter, they have just a deeper sense of knowing. And yeah, it's really what you said at the beginning of the show is, creating safer spaces for people to stutter everywhere.

Joeita Gupta:
You mentioned the King speech, and I was waiting for an opportunity to mention The King's Speech. Because apart from George the fifth, who does overcome his stutter, or is it George the sixth? Nevermind.
Apart from the character who's stuttering, the other character that looms large is the speech therapist who is so integral to the story of this individual overcoming their stutter and trying to salvage their public reputation.
What is the role of the speech therapist. You mentioned earlier about having undergone speech therapy and finding that experience traumatic. Is it a universally traumatic experience, or is there a way to incorporate speech therapists in a way that they can be allies to the stuttering community?

Maya Chupkov:
Such an important question. I'm so glad you asked it. I think speech therapists are so key to the stuttering community, because oftentimes they are the first point of contact for people who want help around stuttering or to navigate it. And so I think it's so important for speech therapists to be part of the stuttering community. And they totally are.
My experience, I have heard a few stories about having a similar experience is mine, where the speech therapist only focused on fluency shaping and hiding the stutter. And so that... and I took speech therapy 20 years ago, so it's definitely come a long way.
Since starting the podcast, I've met so many wonderful speech therapists, many of whom stutter themselves. And it's just really turned my thinking around speech therapy and wishing that I had these speech therapists when I was seeking out help. And I actually interviewed one speech therapist who stutters as a guest.
And he is just so, his approach to speech therapy is so powerful because it's all about confidence building and goal setting, and it's all about the individual like, what do they want out of speech therapy? Do they want to practice tools? Do they want to practice how to feel more comfortable with the stutter? There's just so many ways to approach speech therapy. And so I really think that it is evolving in the right direction.

Joeita Gupta:
When I was researching this interview, Google was very quick to prompt me and say, "Actually, it's not called stuttering anymore." If you check the DSM-5, it's called Childhood-Onset Fluency Disorder, I think is the term. How important is stuttering not as a diagnostic label, but as a political identity?

Maya Chupkov:
Personally, I really think it's important for me to own the stuttering identity. I think the other term that you just used, it just seems to clinical and medical and diagnosing some, I don't know. I just, I don't really like that. I get it that the medical community does have these terms for certain things, but I think it's really important for me to just own stuttering because people are more familiar with it.
And the more we claim stuttering, the more we can help people come out of the shadows and come to terms with stuttering. Because I think calling it what you had just mentioned is it might be harder for people to identify with that.
And one example I'll share is we just had a in-person event in San Francisco where there was three panelists who stutter, including Dustin, who's the bus driver. And each panelist was such a diverse, they had such a different approach to their stutter, and it was wonderful.
And someone in the audience came and he said it was the first time he's ever met someone who stuttered and he started crying. And it was just like, that is the power of claiming stuttering and forming a community is you get people to come out and to really come to terms with it. And not everyone's ready to do that, but this person was, and it was just the most powerful thing to witness.

Joeita Gupta:
Just following on from that, apart from the healing and the forming of communities and the self-confidence which comes from embracing the label or embracing the identity as a stutterer and being a proud stutterer, are there things that can be done beyond that? Can we look to the realm of public policy or changing rules and regulations to try and make stuttering more widely accepted?

Maya Chupkov:
Yes. And I think that's so important to not only do storytelling, but also pairing that with action. And so while Proud Stutter is first and foremost, it's a podcast that is the heart of Proud Stutter, I come from an advocacy and policy background, so it's kind of in my blood. So I'm like, I have to do something beyond storytelling.
And so I decided to experiment with claiming stuttering, having it be in law in San Francisco to start. And so what I did was I worked with one of the supervisors here in San Francisco, and I worked with him on a local resolution recognizing the stuttering community in claiming the second week of May as National Stuttering Awareness Week.
And so that was so powerful because it's in law, and it prompted a rally ahead of the vote where people from the stuttering community came and were able to share their story on a public stage in front of City Hall. So and then that led to media coverage, which just that, those three different elements really is where you can see narratives start to shift.
And that whole thing actually led to Dustin, the bus driver reach out to me and say, "Oh, I heard you on the radio. This is amazing." And then he was on my show. So it's all connected. And I think there's so much opportunity to go even above and beyond the local resolution and start making changes in our education system.
And one other policy change is requiring more insurance plans to integrate speech therapy in their insurance. So if a person does want to seek speech therapy, it's covered by their insurance. So there's so many ways to make stuttering more, yeah, just more accessible and to really improve the lives of people who stutter. And so I'm excited to get into that work as well.

Joeita Gupta:
October 22nd, if I'm not mistaken, is Stuttering Awareness Day. Do you have anything planned for that day at all?

Maya Chupkov:
So for the actual day, I don't have anything planned because it's usually jam packed with everything, every hour there's something. And so what I wanted to do instead was do a lot of events leading up to stuttering, International Stuttering Awareness Day, so it would kind of get people excited.
And so I'm actually partnering with a designer, a graphic artist, His design business is called Facetronomy. And what he does is he designs face illustrations of people. They're really cool. And so I'm partnering with him on an October campaign called Stutttober.
And every Tuesday and Thursday of October, we're sharing out his artwork attached to a story about that person who stutters. And there's going to be raffle prizes, auctioning off artwork around stuttering. And I'm also releasing a pre-release bonus episode of the show. So I'm really using that as a way to connect to the biggest day in stuttering.

Joeita Gupta:
Do you want to leave us with your social media handle and your website and tell us where we can find your amazing podcast?

Maya Chupkov:
Yes. So you can find me at proudstutter.com. All my social media handles are on there. I'm at Proud Stutter on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and we also have a YouTube channel. And yeah, that's where you can find me.

Joeita Gupta:
Maya, it's been such a pleasure speaking to you about this. We don't get to talk about stuttering enough on this program. I actually had one other guest in the almost 600, well, 600 plus episodes of the podcast talking to me about the King speech and the portrayal of stuttering. So you are the second one in about 600 episodes. So thank you so much for speaking to me today.

Maya Chupkov:
Thank you so much for giving me this platform and for honouring the stuttering community in this way. I'm so excited. You guys are amazing.

Joeita Gupta:
Maya Chupkov is the creator of the Proud Stutter Podcast, which you can find on all your favorite podcast platforms. You can also find this show on all your favorite podcast platforms. And of course, if you find us on YouTube, don't forget to subscribe.
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