John Hendrickson Tells the Truth

John and I are both stutterers. We stutter differently, of course, no two stutterers stutter the same, but we both share a tendency to block—that is, we get stuck on sounds, rather than, say, repeating or prolonging them. When we first meet up I tell him that I’d been feeling the same pre-interview jitters I always get—I was anxious that I would stutter. “Isn’t that so dumb!” I say. If there was ever an interview where I could feel I had full permission to be disfluent, this would be it. He smiles.