Twelfth step, The

Abstract

This collection of twelve short stories challenges the issues of addiction and recovery in real and fantastical ways. The collection acts as a meta-arc; each story is meant to guide the reader as they progress through the collection either as someone experiencing addiction and working the 12 Steps or as a general audience of short story readership. Within its fictive guise, characters are stationed in worlds familiar and unfamiliar, local and commonplace, and otherworldly and strained. Settings range from the North Maine Woods to the heart of Los Angeles; from an '90s-inspired conversion camp in the Midwest to a fearful, ethically-wrought U.S. in the not-so-distant-future; from a Chick-fil-A to 1969 to the local 12-Step meeting community bulletin board. The past, present, and future of these stories speak loudly and blend thematically. Genre is bent into different modes of contemporary storytelling as an unexpected way to put recovery on the map, while other traditional narrative forms seek to capture a consciousness both uniquely felt and universally understood by readers and addicts alike.