At our Not Your Parents' Valentine's Day Edition of Tuesday Funk, Patricia Ann McNair read us her essay "Return Trip," from the anthology Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck, and it went just a little like this...

And if you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Mairead Case, Lania Knight, Dana Norris, Zoe Zolbrod, and 2nd Story's CP Chang!

As announced at February's Tuesday Funk, I, Sara Ross Witt, will be hosting this exciting reading series for my last time on Tuesday, March 5th. I cannot express how fun it has been to see this reading grow into what it is, and how fun it has been to help it along in the minuscule ways that I have.

While I am resigning as co-producer and co-host of Tuesday Funk, I am not leaving. This is not good-bye. Instead, this is my chance to say what I've kept in my heart these last three years: thank you, thank you, THANK YOU.

To our readers, you are wonderful and inspiring. Each and every one of you have been very sweet to me, to Bill, to our series. Thank you to our fans and supporters, seeing you every month melts away any stress I carry with me for at least two magical hours.

To Reinhardt Suarez who recommended me for the position, thank you for sharing Tuesday Funk with me. I'm grateful every day to have met you at New School many years ago and to have continued our friendship through yet another reading series!

To Hallie Palladino and Connor Coyne, thank you for placing the care of your beloved series into our hands and thank you for trusting us with its care and growth.

Thank you to Hopleaf, Johnny, and Mark for providing us with a fabulous space, friendship, and tasty drinks. Most especially I want to thank my co-host William Shunn and his lovely wife Laura. They are the heart and soul of Tuesday Funk, growing and innovating the series, as well as turning it into a warm, welcoming family. Bill and Laura, thank you for all that you do for Tuesday Funk, for being my second family and supporting me through the ups (marriage, baby) and downs (major car accident!) of my life, and for believing in me.

I am also delighted to introduce my successor Andrew Huff, founder of Gapers Block. I know he and Bill will do amazing things with Tuesday Funk. I look forward to sitting in the audience the first Tuesday of every month, listening to the talented readers, enjoying a drink (or two) and watching the series evolve!

So please join us for my farewell party and to hear our outstanding readers on Tuesday, March 5, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf?

Dana Norris is the founder and host of Story Club. She once went on a lot of internet dates and she writes about those mistakes for the websites In Our Words and Role Reboot. She blogs at her website dananorris.net. She has been published in The Rumpus, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, the Tampa Review, and her stories have been featured on Vocalo.org (89.5 FM). She performs around Chicago with Mortified, The Paper Machete, The Kates, Essay Fiesta, This Much is True, Write Club, Beast Women, and many others.

Hear Dana and the rest of our outstanding readers on Tuesday, March 5, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf.

At our Not Your Parents' Valentine's Day Edition of Tuesday Funk, Mary Pat Bohan read her personal essay "Brutally Honest," and it went just a little like this...

And if you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Mairead Case, Lania Knight, Dana Norris, Zoe Zolbrod, and 2nd Story's CP Chang!

Zoe Zolbrod's first novel, Currency received a 2010 Nobbie Award and was a Friends of American Writers prize finalist. Short stories and nonfiction have appeared in The Chicago Reader, Knee-Jerk Offline, Fish Stories Collectives, and Maxine, a zine she co-founded in the 1990s. She's a contributor to the literary websites The Nervous Breakdown and The Rumpus, and lives in Evanston, IL, with her husband and two children, where she works as a senior editor for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

Hear Zoe and the rest of our outstanding readers on Tuesday, March 5, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf.

At our Not Your Parents' Valentine's Day Edition of Tuesday Funk, Hanna Martine read us a steamy scene from her paranormal erotic novel A Taste of Ice, and it went just a little like this...

And if you enjoyed that, please join us at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, March 5th, 2013, upstairs at Hopleaf, for an evening with Mairead Case, Lania Knight, Dana Norris, Zoe Zolbrod, and 2nd Story's CP Chang!

Lania Knight lives down-state where she teaches creative writing at a small-ish directional school. Her stories and essays have appeared (or are about to!) in New Stories from the Midwest, Midwestern Gothic, Jabberwock Review, and PANK. Her first book, a novella about a gay teenager in Missouri, was published in August 2012. You can find out more about her at www.laniaknight.com.

Hear Lania and the rest of our outstanding readers on Tuesday, March 5, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf.

Mairead Case (@maireadcase) is a writer, teacher, and graduate student with recent work in Best American Comics 2011, The Unified Field, and at Bright Stupid Confetti. Currently she is Youth Services Assistant at the Poetry Foundation Library and edits projects for featherproof books, Yeti Publishing, and the Public Media Institute, among others. She is completing a novel.

Hear Mairead and the rest of our outstanding readers on Tuesday, March 5, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf.

CP Chang, a company member of 2nd Story, is a writer and software consultant. He received his M.F.A. in fiction writing from Columbia College Chicago, and was formerly an Associate Producer for Elephant Rock Productions. He is blessed to be married to Jessica Young, a teacher, performer, and writer.

CP will be reading as part of our mini-series featuring writers from the new 2nd Story anthology Briefly Knocked Unconscious by a Low-Flying Duck. Hear him and the rest of our outstanding readers on Tuesday, March 5, 7:30 pm, in the upstairs lounge at Hopleaf.

Hey, Funkers! We here at Tuesday Funk have a very special, very naughty Valentine's Day treat for you ... but we're not going to give it up to you as easily as all that. You're going to have to work for it.

It's a video, you see, of a very special, very NSFW reading from last week's edition. But if you want to watch it, you need to head over to our Twitter stream, find the tweet we posted earlier today, and tease out the riddle posted therein.

We'll be waiting, there at the end of the treasure trail. Happy Valentine's Day.