I’ve discovered writing is like magic to me, someone who has been a lifelong stammerer. I can now risk the syllable that sits most appropriately next to its neighbour, not worrying if it has too many parts to manage in a single breath. My words find their special place on these pages, to be seen and read and heard. I am no longer hidden.
When the beginning of life is full of suffering, there is a way through. There is a method to healing, of cradling life in both hands and claiming it as our own.
About the Author
Wen Gibson
I discovered books when my aunty gave me my first book, Black Beauty. I was eight years old. This book opened my eyes to a world of adventure, one where I could escape. The stories also gave me words to describe how I was feeling. I didn’t want to come back.
"I realised that I too could write down my thoughts. Writing helped me make sense of my world and it’s continued to be my main release for any pent-up feelings. I have kept diaries for most of my life, finding it easier to write than speak."
This is how I have remembered so much of my past and from rereading the dozens of letters and aerograms that I have carefully kept.
This manuscript began as a series of poems in a writing course in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1990. The words poured out in short, sharp sentences. An interested publisher asked for the story between the poems, but I wasn’t able to find those words.
The poems sat there for the next thirty years. I realised then that nobody was going to help me tell this story; I would have to do it myself. Once I permitted myself to find my own words, they too poured out, this time in a flood of pages.
One of my poems, Uncle Eric, was runner-up in the Yorkshire Open Poetry Competition in 1993. Other poems were published as part of anthologies – New Beginnings (1993), Reflections (1994) – and during the ‘Zero Tolerance of Violence against Women’ Exhibition run by Renfrewshire Council, Scotland (1995). Joan Woodward published a version of my twin story in The Lone Twin, 1998. My story, The Balloon Family, was short-listed at The Central Coast Writers Festival and published in the anthology Central Coast Kaleidoscope (2001). Some poems were published in the Central Coast Poet’s Inc. Anthologies (2002 and 2008).
My short story, “Speaking through Dysfluency” has been selected to feature in the published book Seniors’ Stories Volume 10, 2024.
This is my first book.
Stammering Against Truth
Have you ever felt out of control of your life? Or been unable to understand your feelings? Maybe you struggle to speak or stand up for yourself.
Wen Gibson battled all these issues, believing the fault was hers. In her search to understand, she crossed three continents, often by bicycle. She settled in Scotland, where she uncovered buried memories of a terrifying Queensland childhood shrouded in threats and lies and of her father’s links to a Brisbane paedophile gang.
"My father was utterly charming. My mother prided herself on how perfect we looked. To the outside world, we were the picture-perfect family. No one would have believed me, even if I could have found the words."
Wen is well qualified to unravel the many strands of her struggle for identity and belonging in this compelling memoir, Stammering Against Truth. She has spent her life learning how to heal and help others heal, using Western and Eastern medicine, psychotherapy and talk therapy. She currently works as a counsellor in New South Wales.
If you want to learn more about resilience – how to pick yourself up and start again – Stammering Against Truth provides thoughtful insights from a survivor to help you along that path.
If we can learn how to drop into the pain, we can find a subtle, quiet presence where we can allow it all. Allow. Not forgive or condone or agree or rage against. Simply allow. It’s a still, bottomless pool of knowing and soft caring love, first to ourselves and then rippling out. That is how we change the world, one tiny ripple of breath at a time.
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I’ve always been here, but I never knew. I do now. I am mine. I feel my heart, quiet, open, beating. I’ve let myself in and found the path to myself. My endless paths out, searching, have led me in. I can say it simply, in one single line - In longing to pierce my mother’s heart, I was finding my own.
