Our long promised and oft delayed upstate reading is upon us. The kind folks at The Wassaic Project will be hosting us as we present, “You were a gift from God, but I ruined you …” on September 16.

At Maxon Mills in the hamlet of Wassaic, NY. We’ll start around 6:30.

With:

Alison Espach is the author of the novel The Adults (Scribner), a New York Times’ Editor’s Choice, a Barnes and Noble Discover Award selection, a Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year, a Kirkus and Library Journal Editor’s Choice, and aChicago Tribune #1 Reader Recommendation. The Adults is currently being adapted to the screen by Electric City Entertainment, and her short stories and essays have appeared in Vogue, Joyland, The Lincoln Center Theater Review, Salon, The Daily Beast, McSweeney’s, Five Chapters, Glamour, and Slice.

Julia Sternberg is a writer and editor living in New York City. She received her M.F.A. in Writing at Sarah Lawrence College in 2017. Her short fiction has previously appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue.   

Katherine Carlson’s work has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn and Fiction Writers Review. After four years in the editorial departments of St. Martin’s Press and Viking, she moved to the other side of the desk to earn an MFA in Fiction from the NYU Creative Writing Program. She now teaches in NYU’s Expository Writing Program and is wrapping up work on her first novel. She tweets about her love for Frank Ocean and George Saunders at @katcarl.

We need to catch up a little. In May we were joined by Ron Kolm, Emma Horwitz, James Capozzi, and Brady Huggett to present “Don’t throw it all away because of your emotions…” The stories and poems were out of this world – intense, captivating, and so well presented aloud. Couldn’t have asked for more, and we thank everyone who read and all those who attended.

We don’t usually have readings back to back (or rather every month), but everything aligned for us to have a June reading, too. Why not! So, this past Wednesday, Emily Temple, Sarah Sarai, and Matt Dojny thrilled us with their work in what was perhaps, the most intimate night of The Disagreement ever.  Maybe it was because the readers went on later than normal (we started this reading at 9 pm). Or maybe, it was because the theme really did get some smoke in our eyes.

Photos below (Ron Kolm, Emma Horwitz, James Capozzi, and Brady Huggett. Emily Temple, Sarah Sarai, and Matt Dojny.)

Sometimes it’s just staring you in the face. Other times it isn’t. And on that note, The Disagreement will present “If you have really good vision …” on June 7.

We’ll start at 9, a little later than usual. But we promise to start on time. As always, we’ll be at the Hi-Fi Bar on Avenue A.

With:

Emily Temple has an MFA from the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoynes fellow and the recipient of a Henfield Prize. Her work has recently appeared in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Colorado Review, Indiana Review, Fairy Tale Review, No Tokens, Territory and elsewhere. She is an associate editor at Literary Hub and lives in Brooklyn.

Sarah Sarai writes poetry and short fiction. Poetry collections are: Geographies of Soul and Taffeta and The Future Is Happy; poems in: Barrow Street, Boston Review, Prelude, etc. Short stories in: Cleaver, Fairy Tale Review, Callisto, etc. and a chapbook, The Young Orator. She has an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Matt Dojny’s debut novel, The Festival of Earthly Delights, was published by Dzanc Books in June 2012 and is now available in paperback. Dojny’s work has appeared in Electric Literature, A Public Space, The Collagist, Better Magazine, and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Visit him at mattdojny.com, or at hiphopisthefuture.com, where he (sometimes) posts a drawing a day.

*image credit: Carol Rama, Bricolage, 1967

It hurts, doesn’t it?

On May 2nd, The Disagreement presents, “Don’t throw it all away because of your ’emotions’ …” Join us at Hi-Fi. We’ll start around 8.

With:

James Capozzi is the author of Country Album (Parlor Press), which won the New Measure Poetry Prize. His poems have appeared recently in Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Posit Journal, and Ohio Edit. He lives in New Jersey.

Emma Horwitz lives and works in New York City.  Previous work in fiction has appeared in Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Joyland Magazine, Two Serious Ladies, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and elsewhere. She also writes for performance, and will begin her MFA in Playwriting at Brown University this fall.

Brady Huggett is a writer and journalist living in New York City.

Ron Kolm is a founding member of the Unbearables and has helped edit their five anthologies. He is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin magazine. Ron is the author of The Plastic Factory, Divine Comedy, Suburban Ambush, Duke & Jill, Night Shift and, with Jim Feast, the novel NeoPhobe. A new collection of his poetry, A Change in the Weather, has just been published by Sensitive Skin books. He’s had work in Flapperhouse, Great Weather for Media, the Resist Much / Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance anthology, The Opiate, Public Illumination Magazine, Local Knowledge, and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. He edited and introduced an Unbearables section in the Outlaw Bible of American Art. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection.

On January 25, we celebrated our 4th anniversary. Each reading we’ve hosted since 2013 has been a blast in it’s own way, but the anniversary events are always an incredible pleasure. That’s because unlike our “normal” readings, where we pick what will be read, on our anniversaries, we invite back a handful of writers to surprise us with new work. And we’re always wowed by what they choose to read.

This year, Jen Levitt, Rebecca Bates, Kayla Rae Whitaker, Sarah Wang, and Paula Bomer gave us poetry, novel excerpts, and creative non-fiction, respectively. Though each writer approached the theme “If only we had known we were going to get played…” in their own way, the work they presented shared the kind of compassionate and deep reaching wit that reminds you why you read in the first place. Photos from the night below. (Top to bottom: Jen Levitt, Rebecca Bates, Kayla Rae Whitaker, Sarah Wang, and Paula Bomer).

The Other News Part: Our next reading is May 2nd and the theme is: “Don’t throw it all away because of your ’emotions’…”

We’re accepting submissions though April 15th.

We’re going to make it. Somehow.

Join us on January 25, same place, same time (HiFi at 8pm) as we bring back some our fav readers from our past lives (Jen Levitt, Sarah Wang, Paula Bomer and Rebecca Bates…) plus Kayla Rae Whitaker, who read for us in our disagreeable infancy, and whose debut novel, The Animators is out on January 31st!

Now for an update: We closed on our third year on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving with four great readers who helped us feel “Just lower than before…” which is to say fucking great.

From top to bottom: Stu Watson, Jen Levitt, Sarah Wang, and Ian MacAllen.

It’s been awhile. We needed a rest. But we return to you renewed and refreshed and ready to present the disturbingly apt “Just lower than before …” on November 22.

We chose this theme almost a year ago. It sounded funny then. Now it just sounds sad.

At the Hi-Fi Bar. We’ll start around eight.

With:

Stu Watson is a writer, musician and teacher who lives in Brooklyn. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in PANK, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, The Collapsar, Flapperhouse, and other publications. A founder and editor of Prelude, he teaches literature at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. 

Sarah Wang is a writer based in New York. In 2016 she won a Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Literary Award runner-up prize. She has written for The Last Newspaper at the New Museum of Contemporary Art; semiotext(e)’s Animal Shelter; The Los Angeles Review of Books; Conjunctions; Story Magazine; and Stonecutter Journal, among other publications. 

Jen Levitt’s poems have appeared in Tin House, Sixth Finch, CutBank, No, Dear and elsewhere. Her first collection is forthcoming in 2016 from Four Way Books.

Ian MacAllen is the Interviews Editor at The Rumpus and the founder of English Kills Review, a website focused on on books, authors, and New York City. His writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Billfold, Electric Cereal, Thought Catalog and elsewhere. Ian received his M.A. in English from Rutgers University in 2012. He lives in Brooklyn and tweets from @IanMacAllen.

And while we’re here: we had some readings earlier this year. We took some pictures. Here they are.

 “Depending on how I grip it …” 

From top to bottom: Julia Philips, Tobias Carroll, Dorian Rolston, Mark de Silva

“Here’s good news if you have to sleep on the floor …”

From top to bottom: Paula Bomer, Lynn Steger Strong, and Jill Capewell. Meredith Turits also read but somehow went inexplicably unphotographed. 

Ever feel like you’re not going to make it? That your life is slipping from your already tenuous grasp? Of course you have. Feeling like you’re losing it might be the only sane response to this modern age.

And on that note, The Disagreement presents “Depending on how I grip it …” on Monday, May 30, featuring four readings about losing one’s hold on reality, their bodies, the past, the present, and everything in-between.

At the Hi-Fi Bar. We’ll start around eight.

With:

Mark de Silva is the author of the debut novel Square Wave, which was released by Two Dollar Radio in February of 2016. He holds degrees in philosophy from Brown (AB) and Cambridge (PhD). After several years on the editorial staff of the New York Times’s opinion pages, he now freelances for the paper’s Sunday magazine, while also serving as a contributing editor for 3:AM Magazine.

Julia Phillips writes about Russia. Her fiction has appeared in The Rumpus, The Toast, and The Antioch Review, while her nonfiction has appeared in BuzzFeed, Jezebel and The Moscow Times. She is a Fulbright fellow in creative writing. Follow her @jkbphillips.

Hi, I’m Dorian Rolston. Nice to meet you too. So I’m…Like Gray, yeah, my parents are big fans, wild about Wilde! All the time. Always nice to hear, though. To think I was almost my dad’s namesake instead, a George, Jr., just like young G Doubya under examples of namesake in a sentence at Merriam-Webster.com. Really! It says: How much did President George Bush influence his son and namesake George W. Bush? Who knows. Possibly rhetorical. I think we think things are more patrilineal than they actually are. Well, my wife took my last name but she was never under the influence of my dad, if that makes sense.

Tobias Carroll is the managing editor of Vol.1 Brooklyn. He is the author of the collection Transitory, out on Civil Coping Mechanisms in August, and the novel Reel, out on Rare Bird in October.

And nobody promised you any hamburgers either. You weren’t promised much of anything, which is why you should be thankful for any crumbs you might get. However, we can promise you a fantastic night of readings next Wednesday, March 2, when The Disagreement presents, “Here’s good news if you have to sleep on the floor …” in the back room of The Hi-Fi Bar. We’ll start around 8.

With:

Jill Capewell is a writer and copy editor living in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared on Joyland, Paper Darts, The Billfold and Nerve. She also co-curates and -hosts the long-running Pete’s Reading Series in Williamsburg.

Lynn Steger Strong‘s novel, HOLD STILL, will be published by Liveright/Norton in March 2016. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Meredith Turits works in editorial at The Foundry at Time Inc. and as fiction editor for The Brooklyn Quarterly, and is the former senior literary editor at Bustle. Her culture writing and fiction has appeared in Vanity Fair, ELLE, The Paris Review Daily, the New Republic, Hobart, Joyland, Five Quarterly, and more. She is currently at work on a novel. Find her in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn or at @meredithturits.

Paula Bomer is the author of Inside Madeleine, the novel Nine Months, and the collection, Baby and Other Stories. Her forthcoming book on Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children is due out late 2016.

It’s like being told Santa Claus isn’t real.

It’s like being told Milli Vanilli couldn’t sing.

It’s like being told the Challenger exploded.

It’s like being told that Bill Cosby is a rapist.

It’s like being told 2020 is only four years away.

On January 13, The Disagreement presents our third anniversary reading, “It’s like being told you’re obsolete.” Join us and some of our favorite readers from 2015 at the back room of the The Hi-Fi Bar.  We’ll start around 8.

With:

Erin Swan is a writer of fiction and non-fiction whose work has been published in various journals, including Asia Literary Review, CALYX, and The Quarterlife Quarterly. She holds an MA in English Education from Teachers College at Columbia University and is currently completing an MFA in Fiction at the New School for Public Engagement. She has worked in publishing, taught English in South and Southeast Asia, and is now teaching literature and writing in a New York City public high school.

Elizabeth Clark Wessel is a founding editor of Argos Books & co-editor of Circumference: Poetry in Translation. She is the author of three chapbooksWhither Weather (GreenTower Press, 2012), Isn’t that You Waving at You (Big Lucks Books, forthcoming in 2015) and Amsterdam (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2015). Her full-length collection Two Suns will be published by The Lit Pub in 2015. She lives in a farmhouse in Connecticut and translates Swedish novels for a living.

Ron Kolm is a member of the Unbearables, and an editor of several of their anthologies; most recently The Unbearables Big Book of Sex! Ron is a contributing editor of Sensitive Skin and the Editor of the Evergreen Review. He is the author ofThe Plastic Factory, Divine Comedy and, with Jim Feast, the novel Neo Phobe. His most recent collection of poems, Suburban Ambush, was published by Autonomedia last year. He’s had work in Hobo Camp Review, Have A NYC 3. theToo Much anthology and the Outlaw Bible of American Poetry. Ron’s papers were purchased by the New York University library, where they’ve been catalogued in the Fales Collection as part of the Downtown Writers Group. Ron read from his new collection, Duke and Jill. 

Allie Werner lives in Brooklyn and works in the basement of a museum. Her work has appeared most recently in NANO Fiction, Corium, and Hobart.