Life on Delay: Colorado journalist on making peace with a stutter
John Hendrickson's essay on Biden's speech difficulties opened an international dialogue on often maligned disability
This is not a story I can write in the third person. Because I was there that 2009 summer day when John Hendrickson joined us at The Denver Post, first as a college intern and later as a full-time music editor. He was gangly, wide-eyed and so clearly giddy to be there — more than that, to actually belong in a major American newsroom — he couldn’t get his words out.
But there was something more to it. The rapid eye blinks. The trembling lips. The repetitions and interruptions on hard sounds. No one had told us our new hotshot intern from Penn State had a profound stutter.
“This poor bastard,” I thought. “How is he ever going to conduct an interview?”
Ten years later, Hendrickson sat across from Joe Biden and the two talked at length about their shared, lifelong struggles with speaking, which Hendrickson turned into a humanizing essay for The Atlantic that changed the trajectory of the 2020 presidential election — and Hendrickson’s life forever.
John Hendrickson then and now: 2012 and 2022
The power of ‘Yes’
To his Denver Post pals — namely Ricardo Baca, John Wenzel and myself — he was just Hendy, a nice kid from Pennsylvania with a disarming demeanor and an intimidating reservoir of indie music knowledge. He writes in his revealing new memoir “Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter” what it meant to him when then-Denver Post Arts Editor Ray Mark Rinaldi hired him — twice.
“Finding a job as a person who stutters is very challenging,” Hendrickson told me — slowly, carefully and ever-haltingly — by phone last week. “Employers often write you off as incapable. I’ve gotten five or six jobs in my life — but I’ve not gotten hundreds of jobs.
“Being in college and not getting any offers despite having some experience and decent clips was really disheartening to me. It made me question if I could ever be a journalist at all.”
But through Rinaldi, Hendrickson learned the enormous power of “yes.” There was a phone interview, which is usually the dealbreaker for a stutterer. Hendrickson stammered through it, but took heart from Rinaldi’s final words: “I like your writing voice.” The only voice that mattered.
“Ray judged me based purely on my writing ability, and that meant everything,” said Hendrickson. “It completely changed the course of my life.”
Hendrickson recalls two seminal experiences from those early days in Denver. His first assignment was to interview two filmmakers who were making a documentary about Drop City, a groundbreaking 1960s artist commune near Trinidad. At this point Hendrickson, just barely 21, dreaded picking up the phone. He sheepishly asked Lifestyles Editor Suzanne Brown if it would be OK if he sent his questions by email.
“Suzanne has a son about my age, and she immediately flipped into mom mode,” he said. “She said, ‘Sure, we do email interviews all the time’” — which he knew was kind, but not true.
His first Denver Post byline, published June 16, 2009, was a triumph — and yet, he felt like a failure. An imposter. “I was playing the part of a professional, and they were all treating me like one,” he writes in his book. “Why couldn’t I find the courage to use the (bleeping) phone?”
A few days later, Music Editor Ricardo Baca gave Hendrickson his dream assignment: Twenty minutes on the phone with Jeff Tweedy, frontman of the band Wilco. There would be no talk of emailing questions. Which was good, because Hendrickson wanted nothing more than to talk — really talk — to his musical hero. But he was afraid. “I felt like I was going to throw up,” he said. But Baca somehow knew he could do it. Had to do it. Hendy took the call in our department conference room, and we all watched through the clear glass window, silently cheering him on.
What must Tweedy have thought when Hendy greeted him, as he types in his book: “Hhhhuy-hey jjj-Jeff this is … JOHN.”
Tweedy, who was not told anything about Hendy in advance, never reacted to the stutter. He just talked to him, musician to journalist. About Wilco’s self-titled new album, about Tweedy being on the road with his son, about the band soon coming to Red Rocks. Hendy relaxed and eventually became, as he puts it, “vaguely conversational.”
“It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever written,” he now says. Because that was the moment he realized he not only could be a professional journalist … he was one.
“Here I was, an intern, still in college, and all of you treated me like an equal,” Hendrickson said. “You viewed me as a person who could do the job despite any disability. That meant all the world. And then to come back after graduation and work there full time? I don’t even have the words for it. It was truly one of the best experiences of my life.”
John Moore called John Hendrickson Denver’s ‘Rock ’n Roll Storm Chaser.’
An experience that could have gone in a very dark and different way. Because, as Hendrickson writes about so honestly in his book, the life of a stutterer is often accompanied by bullying, substance abuse, depression, isolation and shame.
Instead, Hendrickson’s professional life since Denver has moved along like a bullet train. Those were heady Denver days of concerts, happy hours, introducing him to “The Widow Maker” mechanical bull at the Grizzly Rose — and the beginnings of a remarkable journalism career. I called Hendy our “Rock ’n Roll Storm Chaser.”
But he was soon snatched up by Esquire, Rolling Stone and eventually The Atlantic, where at the tender age of 34, he holds the old-sounding title of Senior Politics Editor. All roads leading to Aug. 26, 2019, and a talk with the next president of the United States about a part of him that very few knew or understood.
It’s politely called ‘disfluency’
Stuttering, as some believe, is not an extreme response to anxiety, nervousness or stress. “It is a neurological disorder with a large genetic component,” Hendrickson said. It’s such an ugly word — stuttering. It’s more politely called “disfluency” — but it is what it is, Hendy said. It’s stuttering.
Stutterers know exactly what they want to say but, for reasons scientists don’t fully understand, they have trouble producing a normal flow of speech. Everyday interactions, like simply ordering off a menu, can become so traumatizing, your only safe space is at home.
Perhaps because 99% of the population does not stutter, the disfluent remain among the most misunderstood and easily maligned among those with disabilities. Suffice it to say, not everyone confronted by Hendy’s impediment has been as kind as, say, Jeff Tweedy was.
In his book, Hendrickson tells the traumatizing story of being called on to speak by a stand-up comedian that will leave you — and I say this with intention — speechless. The latest in a lifetime of indignities dating back to kindergarten.
This issue of permissible offensiveness was reinforced when I finished Hendy’s book in happy tears, culminating, as it does, in a meaningful family reconnection. I then turned on my TV and randomly stopped on “Weird,” a wildly entertaining film that parodies the life of the ultimate pop-culture parody artist, Weird Al Yankovic. Soon enough, though, there’s a moment when Daniel Radcliffe turns to the camera as Weird Al and shouts: “Did I stutter?”
While America laughs, knots congeal in Hendrickson’s stomach. He vividly remembers being in a movie theater watching “The Water Boy” and people all around him laughing every time Adam Sandler stumbles on his words. Kids doing hurtful Bobby Boucher impressions on the playground. To Hendrickson, they were, essentially, laughing at him. He was 9.
Even just two years ago, Hendrickson recalls happily waiting out the pandemic in isolation with his eventual wife in their New York apartment binge-watching “The Office” along with most of America. Until they came upon the classic episode where inept boss Michael Scott goads Stanley into participating in a group activity until the gruff salesman, after repeatedly declining, finally erupts in his booming voice: “Did I stutter?”
That moment is considered one of the greatest in the show’s storied history. It was not only immortalized as a meme — it’s the title of the episode. Even while watching TV for comfort, in the safety of his own home, Hendrickson was reminded: There is something wrong with you. And, to the rest of us, it’s funny.
“Many disorders and disabilities are poorly understood, but especially stuttering,” Hendrickson said. “And because it involves talking, we try not to talk about it.” But things are getting better.
“I’m sure that when you were a kid, people made fun of physically disabled people or people in wheelchairs in the same way kids on the playground would call someone the ‘r’ word,” he said. “Thankfully, I don’t think you see that as much anymore. I think those of us who stutter are just waiting for our disorder to become more accepted and less stigmatized.”
Hendrickson’s interview with Biden went a long way toward achieving that goal. Because the day it hit the internet, Hendrickson learned, perhaps for the first time, that he is not alone. That he is part of an international community he never knew existed.
So how did it even happen?
The Biden interview
Hendrickson was just four months into his new job at The Atlantic, barely enough time to learn where the notebooks are kept. His editor asked him to pitch some ideas, and he said he had long pondered writing something about Biden’s life as a stutterer. Her response, like most of the nation? “I never knew Biden had a stutter.” That was the point.
This was May 2019, and Biden already was getting roasted for his verbal stumbles by late-night comics and Fox News pundits. Biden had never talked about it publicly, but Hendrickson picked up on all the physical cues. Biden’s head, hand and eye movements were dead giveaways. To Hendrickson’s astonishment, Biden’s team approved his interview request.
His essay was titled “What Joe Biden Can’t Bring Himself to Say,” and its introduction could not have been more prescient: “His verbal stumbles have voters worried about his mental fitness. Maybe they’d be more understanding if they knew he’s still fighting a stutter.”
The essay launched just before Thanksgiving and immediately went viral. The very next night, the kid who had once been afraid to pick up a phone was being interviewed on MSNBC, then NPR, then PBS. Soon he was flooded with stories from emboldened stutterers from all over the world. “That was the most meaningful part of the Biden experience,” said Hendrickson.
One of the emails was from Hunter Martinez, a 32-year-old attorney with disfluency who told Hendy that an encouraging phone call from then Vice President Biden 11 years before is what got him through the University of Denver Law School. Imagine that, he thought: A successful attorney who stutters. Thus began one of the most meaningful friendships of Hendrickson’s life. One that ended last January with Martinez’s death from colon cancer. He was just 34, a husband, father and, by the end, one of Hendrickson’s closest friends.
Hendrickson is hoping to see Martinez’s wife, Jessica, when he comes through Denver on Thursday to talk with Wenzel as part of his book tour at the Colfax Tattered Cover Book Store.
“When I first started working on the book, Hunter and I would talk about a hypothetical Tattered Cover event as kind of a carrot,” he said. “Anytime I would get down on myself, he’d say, ‘I can’t wait for your book signing at the Tattered Cover.’ And that was two years before he knew the book would ever be finished.
“Since he died, I’ve prayed to him and I’ve communed with him, sometimes daily. I ask him for help and I can feel him helping me with things even though he’s not here anymore.”
“Life on Delay” is a remarkable read for all sorts of reasons. He talks to experts and both everyday and celebrity stutterers like Emily Blunt and Alex Brightman. He writes about repairing harm. And he writes about the supposed “magic pill” doctors are working on that one day might relax stuttering the way antibiotics suppress bacteria.
A young Hendy — the one who grew up wanting nothing more than to be just like everyone else — would have taken that pill in a heartbeat. “But now in my early 30s, this thing is woven so deep into my identity that I may not recognize myself if I didn’t stutter,” he said.
He now sees the gifts it has brought. “It’s made me a better listener, it’s made me a more empathetic person and it’s made me more curious about the world,” he said. “So I don’t know if I would take a magic pill, because I no longer view it as this terrible, dark, shameful problem that I need to get rid of.”
Ultimately, “Life on Delay” is not a book about stuttering. And it’s not about erasing your problems. “It’s about trying to make peace with whatever big thing you’re lugging around — and we are all lugging around at least one big thing inside of us,” he said. “Whatever your thing is, my hope is that this book offers just a tiny glimpse into learning how to let your thing ride shotgun with you. Whatever it is, it’s there — but it doesn’t have to keep you from moving forward in life.”
I’m not proud of this, but Hendy tells me a cherished memory from his Denver Post days is “the many nights when the two of us were the last ones left at the office, or the only ones there on a Saturday or Sunday morning.” He says he remembers that when I took a buyout in 2011, my final, typically maudlin and no doubt late-night advice to him was this: “Don’t end up like me.”
He certainly took that advice. He’s living his life to the fullest … without delay.
John Moore is The Denver Gazette’s senior arts journalist. Email him at john.moore@denvergazette.com.
- ‘Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter’
- What: John Hendrickson in conversation with John Wenzel, followed by book signing
- When: 6 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 26
- Where: Tattered Cover Book Store, 2526 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, 80206
- To order the book: tatteredcover.com
John Hendrickson, second from right, attends an Avett Brothers concert at Red Rocks in 2011 with then-Denver Post colleagues, front from left, Ricardo Baca, Joe Murphy and John Moore. The senior politics editor at The Atlantic says his time in Denver “completely changed the course of my life.”
Denver attorney Hunter Martinez died of colon cancer in January 2021.
John Hendrickson’s memoir, “Life on Delay,” was released Jan. 17 and is available at the
. John Moore called Hendrickson, pictured below, Denver’s “Rock ’n Roll Storm Chaser.”