“Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB)” is the digital storytelling project I founded and developed in 2019 (and ran until 2021), which invited Queer storytellers to share Queerstories of recovery, working from a rhetorical methodology that embraces Queer literacies, intersectionality, and inclusivity.
In Chapter 4 of my dissertation, titled “ The Public Work of Queering Recovery Literacy,” I highlight my digital storytelling project “Voices from Rock Bottom (VFRB),” that began in May of 2018, in production with Maker Park Radio – NYC, to suggest that researchers must consider public ways of recovery storytelling that challenge (hetero)norms so Queer alcoholics and addicts in recovery can co-create space to tell versions of their stories that include their Queer experiences, moving towards the possibility of storytelling that embraces and reclaims their full identities that have been limited by the hegemony of
A.A. This project not only informs the methodology of my dissertation but is an interview series focused on alcoholism and addiction and recovery narratives within the Staten Island community. VFRB is public civic engagement and advocacy through digital humanities. I examine the nuances and subjectivity in the personal storytelling of Queer guests, through the interviews conducted by me during the livestream events of “Voices from Rock Bottom.”
VFRB (the VFRB acronym stands for “Voices from Rock Bottom”) not only focuses on alcoholism, addiction, and recovery storytelling by the members of the Staten Island community but serves as a social model for performance rhetoric. VFRB offers a digital and multimodal platform for recovery storytelling, that is further supported by a blog, which serves as a digital archive for all recorded live-streams, biographies, artifacts, photos, etc. The radio show brings direct access to recovery stories through multiple platforms, such as Facebook Live-Stream video, Maker Park Radio app, Livestream app, VFRB live video, Mixlr, the radio station website, etc. By sharing recovery stories and personal histories via live-stream radio and these additional digital platforms, a public audience gets immediate access to the voices and faces of alcoholics and addicts (some with discretionary preferences), as well as family members, friends, professionals, and community workers who are all part of “the narrative,” and deal with the disease of addiction (and alcoholism).
VFRB is a community-based, civic-engaged storytelling project leaning on literacy studies and feminist theory (Collins, Crenshaw, hooks; Lorde;) which allow me to explore ways to resolve the inequities of power in that have discriminated against bodies and identities of particular groups of individuals in dialogic ways. I apply intersectional feminist perspective to alcoholics and addicts sharing their stories via the community live-stream radio show as a way to deconstruct the authoritarian societal understanding of the community of people. Specifically, in this chapter, I show how the radio show practices local recovery literacy in a feminist socially constructed space, a Maker Space in Staten Island New York. VFRB creates a new space for alcoholics and addicts to share their stories so that others can see how it resists the notion that the dominant recovery narrative should continue to be manufactured and marketed within the spaces where it originated.
By having studied recovery literacy as a social practice in feminist and Queer community storytelling spaces, like “Voices from Rock Bottom” in Maker Park Radio – NYC, the act of doing so makes it possible for Queer identities to pull themselves from the margins, and speak for themselves, their whole selves. It is through “Voices from Rock Bottom,” where I believe participants, especially Queer storytellers, are able work through their Queer experiences and recovery experiences while reclaiming identity and power, while also transforming their recovery stories in a space that promotes empathy, healing, and diligence. For me personally, the “Voices from Rock Bottom’ podcast has helped me pull my identity and experiences back from the margins, in a way that moves towards centering the recovered storyteller’s experience and not the institution’s. Maybe this is my way of putting together a counter narrative of A.A., a Queerstory of recovery.
