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.

 Join us Tuesday, September 6, 7:30 p.m., at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Carissa and all of our talented readers!

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!

Join us Tuesday, September 6th, 7:30 p.m., at Hopleaf's upstairs bar to hear Edison read his fiction!

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!

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)."  

 "Office Footwear," an article about seeing co-worker's bare feet in the workplace, began as an experimental article on OpenSalon.com where Noreen writes under a pseudonym.

What's that boiling across the horizon with all the crackling power of late-summer thunderstorm? It's only Tuesday Funk, with a September lineup that will ionize your intellect and electrocute your emotions. For our next outing at Hopleaf, you can look forward to bottled literary lightning from the likes of Edison Blake, Carissa DiGiovanni, AD Jameson, Noreen Natale, and Naomi Buck Palagi, plus another patented Poem By Bill. Oh, and don't forget the dozens of varieties of good, cold beer!

Tuesday Funk convenes Tuesday, September 6, 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 CP Chang, Hanna Martine, Patricia Ann McNair, Erin Shea Smith, Matthew Darst, Liz Baudler, and yours truly, among many others. You won't want to miss a single reading!

In our humble opinion, Tuesday Funk just keeps getting better and better. What can we submit as evidence, you ask? May it please the court, we present our August 2nd reading at Hopleaf, which, in succession, drew a standing-room crowd and blew its socks off. Honest, we had to gather up all the socks after the audience had departed. The occasion was, in part, a makeup session for some of the readers from our legendary February reading who were prevented from attending by the blizzard, with a couple of jokers tossed into the deck to keep everyone on their toes.

Blizzard refugee Karen Skalitzky kicked things off with "Out," a funny and heartfelt excerpt from her memoir-in-progress. Sondra Morin favored us with a sheaf of her superb poetry. And snowstorm reschedulee Julie Rosenthal enthralled with excerpts from two of her short stories.

After a break to let our audience visit John at the bar, co-host William Shunn read his poem "Immortality." Tegan Jones scored with an excerpt from her novel-in-progress The Year of the Rabbit. February returnee Eden M. Robins delighted us with the prologue from her novel The Grand Adventure of Aught-Nine. And the prodigal yet prodigious Jerry Schwartz hit big with a reading and a song from his novel Pixels of Young Mueller.

(You can check out Jerry's song, "The King of I Don't Care," in the video below, or watch his full performance here. Or if you'd prefer to watch the entire evening's program straight through, you can do that here.)

In short, it was far more than just a makeup session—more like a makeout session with the minds of our Tuesday Funk audience. And if you want to get that same treatment, please join us September 6th for an evening with Edison Blake, Carissa DiGiovanni, AD Jameson, Noreen Natale, and Naomi Buck Palagi. We promise you won't regret it the morning after.

It's hot as an iron foundry out there, so what better way to replenish your cool than joining us tonight for Tuesday Funk, the monthly Chicago reading series where good writing and good beer mix. This evening, in honor of our 6 x 6 = 36th epic episode, we're bringing you six great readers for no more than the price of a single ice-cold beer.

Our scorching lineup on this hottest night of the year includes several readers we're bringing back from our fabled February blizzard edition, so get ready to greet the hardy Karen Skalitzky, Jerry Schwartz, Julie Rosenthal, and Eden M. Robins, not to mention the intrepid Sondra Morin and Tegan Jones. We'll also throw in one of our patented Poems By Bill for no extra charge.

So grab a beer from the bar, "like" us today on Facebook, and we'll all cool down at Hopleaf tonight!

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.

Jerry Schwartz is the author of Pixels of Young Mueller, a coming-of-age tale published in 2010 by All Things That Matter Press. The book is available at Amazon in paperback and Kindle Edition, and you can visit Jerry's website at www.itsjerryschwartz.com.

Jerry also writes, plays, sings, and produces the music of The Jerrys, a fictional band that appears in his novel. The Jerrys' new album, Let's Groove, is available on iTunes, and you can download their new single, "Bigger Than Oprah," on their website at www.itsthejerrys.com.

Join Tuesday Funk on August 2nd, 7:30 p.m., to hear Jerry and all of our talented readers at Hopleaf's upstairs bar!