Tuesday, August 26, 2014

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My name is Dylan Madeley, and I've struggled to come to terms with two different aspects of my life. The first one set me on a path of frustration and retrying, constant self-improvement, bouts of social isolation, and has ultimately played a huge role in defining who I am today. The second one is stuttering, which I've lived with since about age five. In both cases, I spent some time running away in one form or another; in both cases, I have felt more whole as a person by accepting them and being more open about them. I live in a suburb north of Toronto with two chinchillas, write and copy edit for Auxiliary Magazine, and in my spare time pursue a career as a novelist. I have written one manuscript of minimum 50,000 words each year since 2008.

Since this blog has a stuttering/cluttering focus, I'll share my views about how these two things relate to each other. I took up creative writing a few years after developing a stutter, and my dad inspired me to tell stories. While I can't reach into my thought processes at the time, I strongly suspect that here I was with very real and seemingly insurmountable communication difficulties, immediately setting me apart from every other kid I knew (for years, the only other two stutterers I had ever met were two guys who also attended Sick Kids for speech therapy). The written word has its own challenges, vast and not perfectly understood by me at a