PANK Invasion Reading Series: Brooklyn

Assistant Editor, Abby Koski, organizer of PANK's Brooklyn Invasion, introduces the night's readers.

Sometimes you spend more time traveling than you do in the place traveled to. Sometimes it’s so hot and humid there, so goddamned sticky and uncomfortable and bad smelling, the act of sitting in the shade and breathing becomes an aerobic exercise in claustrophobia.

Matthew Thorburn

Sometimes you crash on a little couch in a friend’s teacup apartment and their child (a beautiful, angelic child, mind you) wakes you each of your two mornings at 5:30 am. Sometimes there are disheveled men on the G train yelling and swinging bricks through the air. Sometimes you question your choices.

Amber Sparks

But there are times when the virtues of a people and place outweigh the inconvenience of having to change your t-shirt four times in one day, times when you remember you have friends (friends with beautiful, angelic children) whom you can lean on, times when your car on the G train is visited not by a brick wielding lunatic, but by a Mariachi band.

Jeffrey Morgan

There are times when you throw a reading in a great venue, in a great city, one where a large and gracious audience awaits, and where writers make magic with their words, times when you think, maybe just for a moment, it was worth it, even for such a short time, for such a little, silly thing.

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Thanks to Abby Koski for doing the heavy lifting, to Pete’s Candy Store for hosting, to our wonderful cast of writers — Melissa Broder, Sean Doyle, Sarah Rose Etter, Jeffrey Morgan, Daniel Nester, Amber Sparks, Matthew Thorburn, and Deb Olin Unferth — for bringing their A games, and to all the Brooklynites that came out in the heat and the stink to make the evening great.