At this week's Tuesday Funk, co-host William Shunn read “You Are Here,” a poem he composed for the tenth anniversary of the September 11th terror attacks. (He lived in Queens near the East River at the time.) Here's the brief video:
Tuesday Funk : Page 115
We've laid in a strong cache of supplies, with readings from C.P. Chang, Erin J. Shea, Liz Baudler, zombie fiction by Matt Darst, and a sci-fi baseball story from your Co-Master of Cemeteries William Shunn. And what would an October apocalypse be without dozens of varieties of cold beer to tide you over?
Tuesday Funk convenes Tuesday, October 4, 2011, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf, 5148 N. Clark St., Chicago. Arrive early, stake out a table in the upper room, and grab a beer from John at the cash-only bar. We start seating at 7:00 pm and no earlier. Admission is always free, but you must be 21 or older. And come early or stay afterward for some great Belgian-style food downstairs.
Please bring plenty of friends, and become a fan of Tuesday Funk on Facebook so you never miss an invitation to our readings, which later this fall will feature the likes of John Klima, Hanna Martine, Matt Wood, Patricia Ann McNair, JD Adamski, and many more. You won't want to miss a single tasty morsel.
BRAAAAIIIIINNNNS.
Hey, if you weren't at Hopleaf this week for Tuesday Funk, you missed a good 'un, a real good 'un. 12-point buck good, in fact.
We had Carissa DiGiovanni reading us poems, Noreen Natale telling us amusing stories, and Naomi Buck Palagi on a return visit to read us more poems. After a break for beer and a downer of a 9/11 poem from co-host William Shunn, we had a rip-snorter of an excerpt from Edison A. Blake's recent novel, and a wild selection of prose from A D Jameson (not to mention plenty of audible gasps from the audience). And the elk? The elk was present only in our hearts.
In fine, it was a spirited and challenging kickoff to our fall season, which will continue on October 4th with the work of Erin Shea Smith, Liz Baudler, CP Chang, zombie fiction by Matthew Darst, and a sci-fi baseball story from William Shunn. It's a veritable Oktoberfest of good stuff, so next time take careful aim because you won't want to miss your shot.
Our electric lineup tonight includes AD Jameson, Edison Blake, Noreen Natale, Naomi Buck Palagi, and Carissa DiGiovanni, none of whom you'll want to miss. We'll also throw in one of our patented Poems By Bill for no extra charge. So "like" us today on Facebook, grab a beer from the bar, and we'll all get blown away tonight at Hopleaf.
Hopleaf is at 5148 N. Clark St. in Chicago. The reading begins at 7:30 pm in the upstairs lounge. The lounge opens at 7:00 pm. Arrive early for a seat!
As always, the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf is cash-only and 21 and over. Remember also that no food can be brought in from the restaurant.
Our September reading is coming up fast, and there's no better way to get in the right frame of mind than with videos from past events. This reading from August—relating Karen Skalitzky's moving encounter with, yes, a car wash door—should set the stage nicely and give you a good idea what to expect...
And be sure to join us tomorrow night, Tuesday, September 6, 7:30 pm, upstairs at Hopleaf, for five more great readers, including AD Jameson, Edison Blake, Noreen Natale, Naomi Buck Palagi, and Carissa DiGiovanni!
Carissa DiGiovanni is a third-generation Chicagoan who works in the non-profit sector. Her work has appeared in Sierra Nevada College Review, Journal of Experimental Fiction, SLAB, and Muslim, Wake Up! She graduated from the MFA program in Creative Writing at Indiana University, Bloomington. Currently, she is working on a chapbook.
A D Jameson is the author of two books: the prose collection Amazing Adult Fantasy (Mutable Sound, 2011), in which he tries to come to terms with having been raised on '80s pop culture, and the novel Giant Slugs (Lawrence and Gibson, 2011), an absurdist retelling of the Epic of Gilgamesh. He has taught classes at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lake Forest College, DePaul University, Facets Multimedia, and StoryStudio Chicago. He is also the nonfiction / reviews editor of the online journal Requited. This fall, he became a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In his spare time, he contributes to the group blog Big Other.
Join us Tuesday, September 6, 7:30 p.m., at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear AD and all of our talented readers!
Born in a tragically small town in Illinois, Edison Blake spent his earliest years larking about in a dog pen built by his doting daddy in the backyard of their tiny house. After a while, the realization that he would have to go to school if they expected him to be housebroken led to enrollment in a succession of parochial, public and private schools, none of which was able to provide a cure. Fortunately, he learned to read--even more fortunately, at a formative age, someone gave him a pencil and a few scraps of only slightly used paper. He has been, ever since, doggedly scribbling lines one word after another with the same honest terror and attention to detail that guides a tightrope artist walking the line one foot after the other.
Now, a technologist, musician and writer living in Wisconsin, he tends his own garden, and revels in the joys attendant upon being a family man. His novel, The Original Artificial Stud is available at Amazon.com and other online bookseller. His latest flash fiction pieces are currently up online at PureSlush.com. The Big Time, a raunchy little rock and roll episode, is taken from a week in the many years Edison spent playing rock and roll up and down Clark street in good ol' Chi town.
Though he is no longer a dog, and though he is, thankfully, housebroken, he is not, in any other sense, broken.
His recently completed novel, Undead Vikings in Love, will be available soon. Keep watching the skies!
Naomi Buck Palagi has been interested in words, sound, meaning, and dialect along with other "shaping crafts" such as woodworking, sewing and singing, since her childhood in rural Kentucky.
She became focused on writing poetry in 2008 as an amazingly flexible vehicle for thought and communication, and since then has had work published in journals such as Spoon River Review, Otoliths, Moria, Wicked Alice, Blossombones and Blue Fifth Review. Additionally, she has two chapbooks, Silver Roof Tantrum (dancing girl press), and Darkness in the Tent (Dusie Kollectiv 5).
She lives in Northwest Indiana with her husband and two young children, and works days as a secretary at a college in Gary.
Join us Tuesday, September 6th, 7:30 p.m., at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Naomi's poetry!
She became focused on writing poetry in 2008 as an amazingly flexible vehicle for thought and communication, and since then has had work published in journals such as Spoon River Review, Otoliths, Moria, Wicked Alice, Blossombones and Blue Fifth Review. Additionally, she has two chapbooks, Silver Roof Tantrum (dancing girl press), and Darkness in the Tent (Dusie Kollectiv 5).
She lives in Northwest Indiana with her husband and two young children, and works days as a secretary at a college in Gary.
Noreen Natale is a fan of humor so it's fortunate that she live in Chicago and had early access to Second City. As an undergrad, her first creative writing class was taught by John Powers, author of "Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up." She continued her writing education with classes at Columbia College, a B.A. degree in Communications/Journalism from Loyola and comedy writing at Second City.
While earning a living as a marketing professional Noreen published articles and short stories in local newspapers. One story, "The Unemployment Cure for Migraines", made it to the Wall Street Journal's Career Journal. That article is now part of the collection titled "My Humor's Working (Even if I'm Not)."
Join us Tuesday, September 6th, 7:30 p.m., at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Noreen share her work!
