Tribute: Catherine Montgomery 1951 - 2010

Catherine Montgomery

It was with enormous sadness and shock that I heard about Catherine Montgomery?s death from cancer in May this year.

Catherine was founder and director of the American Institute of Stuttering (AIS) in New York. She was passionate about helping people who stammer and about sharing her work with colleagues. I first met Catherine in 2001 at a conference in New Orleans. She spoke in a symposium on integrating approaches to therapy that had been thought of as mutually exclusive. Catherine had come from a 'speak-more-fluently' background teaching clients a fluency technique, vocal fold management. Whilst her courses had helped people enormously she had come to realise it was important to spend more time on other aspects such as desensitisation and stammering management strategies. These are ways of working that are described as 'stammer-more-fluently' approaches and she described how she had created a programme synthesising the two ways of working. We at City Lit had been firmly in the stammer-more-fluently camp for many years but had started to feel that some clients could benefit from some direct fluency work. Inspired by her presentation in New Orleans, two of us went to visit the AIS in 2003 and as a direct result set up our own integrated intensive programme. We would have struggled to do this without Catherine's incredibly generous support and encouragement. She shared her experience, wisdom and materials and at the same time was keen to learn from us too.

It is hard to do justice to Catherine in a few words. She was warm, generous, vibrant, great fun to be with, full of optimism and enormously charismatic. Within hours of her death the AIS website was filled with tributes from clients, colleagues and friends that indicate just how many lives she touched and how many feel the loss. Whilst she is no longer here with us her work will go on through the many people, clients and colleagues, who she inspired through her passion for helping people who stammer.

Carolyn Cheasman, City Lit

Tributes to Catherine at http://stutteringtreatment.org/blog/catherine/

From the Autumn 2010 issue of 'Speaking Out', page 19

See also:
London's City Lit - new building, new approach - on the introduction of City Lit's integrated courses.
BSA Conference call with Catherine Montgomery