Self-destruction or self-preservation, adventure or stability, the routine or the weird — “Too much of nothing,” Bob Dylan sang, “can make a man feel ill at ease.” Yet the right amount of nothing, that is the absence of danger or fear, can also be reassuring. This is the hard balance we try to strike in our lives, somewhere between the thrill of the unknown and the tranquility found in contentment: a night of binge-watching the first six seasons of Law and Order: SVU versus pancakes with your lover; standing up for yourself to your parents versus worrying about how sad it might be for your child to grow up to be a dentist; delivering the proper amount of pepper to an obnoxious customer versus letting him have it the way you know he deserves to have it had.

On September 12th, The Disagreement presents Satan Vs. Your Dentist, where four writers and a filmmaker will present work that explores these and other disparate notions of the safe and the risky, investigating our seemingly contradictory desires for both comfort and calamity.

Find us at Culturefix, 9 Clinton Street on the illustrious Lower East Side. We’ll start at 7.

With:

Nicole Callihan’s book of poems, Fly by Night, will be released by Sock Monkey Press in early 2014.

J.T. Bushnell was named a top-ten emerging fiction writer by Storyville.com in 2012. His fiction has appeared most recently in New Madrid, The South Carolina Review, and Iron Horse Literary Review. He also writes craft essays for Poets & Writers, The Writer, and Fiction Writers Review, where he is a contributing editor. He lives in Corvallis, Oregon, where he teaches at Oregon State University.

Sarah Hanssen’s film and video works have shown at festivals, museums and screenings throughout North America, Asia and Europe. She received her Masters of Fine Art in film and video at the Massachusetts College of Art. In addition to her artwork, she teaches at CUNY’s Bronx Community College and mothers her three kids.

Carmen Maria Machado  is a fiction writer and essayist whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, The American Reader, Tin House‘s Open Bar, Five Chapters, Best Women’s Erotica 2012, VICE, The Paris Review Daily, The Hairpin, The Rumpus, Los Angeles Review of Books, and many other publications. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Philadelphia.

Alex Morris was born and raised in Mobile, Alabama and received an MFA in poetry from NYU. He has worked for New Orleans Review and McSweeney’s Poetry Series. He runs the Southern Writers Reading Series, which takes place the second Wednesday of each month at Happy Ending Lounge. He lives in Brooklyn.