Anniversaries Vs. Your Funeral was a celebration of the end of our first year, and it set a high bar for the next one. Writers from each of the six installments so far were asked to come and surprise us with the pieces they read. Most responded to the death and dying portion of our theme, often with profane and hilarious takes on it. Others were more subdued and moving. A few managed to be both. And all of them were wonderful examples of the kinds of work The Disagreement went looking for, and found, when we wanted to see what was so funny about the sad, grotesque, and the perverse.

It was hard for us to pick which writers we wanted to read on our anniversary, because the mission we set for ourselves, other than to present a night of literary readings that would be entertaining, was to only feature work that we we were both passionate about. So to choose just a handful from the twenty-eight writers, poets, and filmmakers we’ve presented was a bit of a Sophie’s choice for us. Over the last year we’ve found the work that we’ve assembled for these readings from a variety of sources: friends and acquaintances, submissions, and by occasionally stalking writers who we stumbled across on the internet or in literary journals and hounding them until they agreed to read for us. And it’s been a unique pleasure to find these myriads of stories, poems, and short films that we love and then to present them to an audience with the hopes that they love them in turn, and we’d like to thank everyone who’s read for taking part.

Join us on March 12th when The Disagreement Presents: Shithoused, an evening of readings about drugs and drink and other forms of inebriation. Submissions are still open, so send us something.

From top to bottom: Thaddeus Rutkowski, Marina Weiss, Samuel Cooper, Reineke Hollander, Alex Morris, and Kayla Rae Whitaker.

* The image at top was borrowed from This Charming Charlie.

On January 8th, The Disagreement presents its first installment of 2014 — Anniversaries Vs. Your Funeral. Over our last six readings we’ve found writers via submissions, friends, and scouring journals and the internet for new and interesting work that we love. It’s been a pleasure to put these nights together, and for our first anniversary readers culled from the past year will read selections of their choice. So for once, the proceedings will be out of our control. Consider it our highlight reel.

At Culturefix, 9 Clinton Street, starting at 7pm.

With:

Samuel Cooper is a writer, classicist, and freelance mathematician. His work has appeared in Hyperallergic, Linear and Multilinear Algebra, and other places. He grew up in Alabama and now lives in Brooklyn. His cell phone does not connect to the internet.

Reineke Hollander is a visual artist and writer who was born in the Netherlands and has lived in Brooklyn since 1986. She has worked as a translator, and as a journalist for the Dutch daily newspaper NRC-Handelsblad.  She recently completed a writing fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center.  She is currently working on a fictionalised memoir about growing up  in the Netherlands after World War II and in  the Sixties, tentatively titled Behaving Well in Times of War. Further information can be viewed at reinekehollander.com.

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Haywire, Tetched and Roughhouse. All three books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award, and Haywire won the Members’ Choice Award. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York. He received a fellowship in fiction writing from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Kayla Rae Whitaker is originally from Eastern Kentucky and has an MFA in fiction from New York University. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming  in Smokelong  Quarterly, Joyland, B O D Y, Bodega, Burnt Bridge, and Still. She recently appeared alongside such luminaries as Lynyrd Skynyrd in the History Channel’s southern culture documentary “You Don’t Know Dixie.” She is currently at work on a novel about raging lady cartoonists. You can also find her on Twitter @kaylarwhitaker.

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. He lives in Brooklyn.

Marina Weiss is a research assistant in the department of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. She is the poetry editor of the magazine formerly known as Explosion-Proof, and her poetry is published or forthcoming in Tin House, Narrative, Canteen, Paper Darts, Painted Bride Quarterly, dislocate, and elsewhere.