Well it's my birthday too, yeah,

Mother Fool's Tee-shirts! Available starting this weekend in the cafe.

Saturday, June 3 is our 22nd Birthday!! Thanks to everyone who has helped keep us in business. It continues to be a pleasure to provide coffee, tea and cookies to the Willy St Neighborhood. Also, thanks to the thousands of performers who have graced our tiny stage. There have been a lot of wonderful sounds in here!

June's art show is "Syria from the Heart: Photos from 2005" by Julie S. Majerus. She will host a reception on Sunday, June 4 from 6 to 8pm.
http://motherfools.com/art.php?uri=art&artshowid=227

---- This Weekend ----

Fri, Jun 2 The Madtown Poetry Open Mic w/ Featured Reader: Gillian Nevers

Gillian Nevers grew up in Wauwatosa, Wisconsin, although she considers Madison her home town, as she came here in 1962 to attend the University of Wisconsin and never left. She taught art in the Madison schools for two and one-half years after graduation, until she was forced to “retire” because she was pregnant. After both of her sons were in school and she went back to work, she switched careers and spent the next twenty plus years working with victims of crime. Gillian began writing poems after retirement and in 2002, when one of her poems was published, declared herself a poet!

Gillian’s poems have appeared in Silk Road, Wisconsin People and Ideas, Pearl, Pirenes Fountain, Verse Wisconsin, Right Hand Pointing, Architrave Press, Heron Tree Review, Silver Birch Press and other print and online literary magazines and anthologies. She won second prize in the 2008 Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters statewide poetry contest and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2011.

Gillian has been an active member of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, where she has served as Membership Chair and written a Markets column. She currently coordinates the WFOP calendar reading for the Madison area. Gillian also coordinates poetry readings in conjunction with exhibitions at the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. In addition, she teaches writing to adults at a week long workshop for the Road Scholar program. She’s also writes poetry with kids at the Greater Madison Writing Project summer camp at Olbrich Gardens.

Gillian lives in Madison with her husband, Dan, and their irascible, but sweet dog, San Rocco.

The Madtown Poetry Open Mic, hosted by Ron Czerwien at Mother Fool's Coffeehouse, welcomes all forms of poetry. Readers in the open mic are invited to read their original work for up to five minutes. Sign up starts at 7:30pm and the event begins at 8:00pm.

For over ten years Ron hosted poetry readings as well as an open mic at Avol's Bookstore in Madison. His poems have appeared both on-line and in print journals. His manuscript, "The Office of Uncomfortable Admissions," received an honorable mention in the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Contest. Ron serves on the board of The Council for Wisconsin Writers, and sells used and out-of-print books on-line under the name Avol's Books LLC. If you have questions about the open mic, call Ron at 608-255-4730, or email him at avols@chorus.net.

Sun, Jun - Art Reception for Julie S. Majerus

Come meet our featured artist for June.

6 - 8 pm

Free and open to the public

https://www.facebook.com/events/1801765486782374

---- Next Weekend ----

Fri, Jun 9 Vegetarian Alcoholic Press - Poetry Reading - $5

Milwaukee’s Vegetarian Alcoholic Press will hold a poetry reading featuring five writers it has published at Mother Fools.

This will be the first official reading the press has held in Madison during its three-year run.

The featured readers of the evening consist of emerging poets Nathan Fredrick (aka Freddy La Force, Milwaukee), Georgia Lundeen (Minneapolis), Bethany Price (Milwaukee), Troy Schoultz (Oshkosh), and Kelly Sexton (La Crosse). All five poets vary in style from frank to mythical to macabre.

Nathan Fredrick is the pen name of Freddy La Force, publisher and editor at Vegetarian Alcoholic. He has produced 11 books for the label since 2014, including two containing his own words, Parallelograms (with Heidi Koos, 2014) and Fall Catalogue (2016). He most recently edited an anthology of 47 Milwaukee poets, Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters.

Georgia Lundeen has a taste for the fantastic but always writes sincerely. Her bold use of traditional meter and occasionally even (gasp) rhyme should not frighten the poetry aficionado as her lines are both surprising and congruent. She self-published her first children’s book, Love Like Us, with Alexandra L. Hemrick in 2014. Her first full-length collection of poetry, spare, was released by Vegetarian Alcoholic in April 2017. More of her poems can be found at sparepoetry.com

Bethany Price holds a degree in creative writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She doesn’t own a watch but is obsessed with time and its great tragedies. Her poems appear online in BlazeVOX, Media Schmedia, and 2River. She lives in Milwaukee and walks around with no shoes fairly often. She has a chapbook through pity milk press in 2013 called All I Wanna Do and a book through Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2014 entitled Terror. She is an actress occasionally. Bethany edits articles for The Art Shore, a local arts blog started by Jerrod Johnson. She also appears in the anthology Return to the Gathering Place of the Waters.

Troy Schoultz is a lifelong Wisconsin resident. He is currently a lecturer at the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley, where he also edits the nationally recognized Fox Cry Review. His interests and influences include garage rock, vinyl LPs, found objects, the paranormal, abandoned places, folklore, old cemeteries and the number five. His poems, stories, and reviews have all appeared in Seattle Review, Nerve Cowboy, Rattle, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Word Riot, Fish Drum, Midwestern Gothic and several others since 1997. He was nominated in 2012 for a Pushcart Prize by Slipstream literary magazine, and is the author of two chapbooks, A Field of Bonfires Sings (Wolf Angel Press, 1999) and Good Friday (Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, 2005). His first full collection, Biographies of Runaway Dogs, was published by Vegetarian Alcoholic in 2016. He currently resides in Oshkosh, WI.

Kelly Sexton holds an MFA in Writing and Poetics from Naropa University, is the former poetry editor for Bombay Gin, and loves asparagus. She has been published in Monkey Puzzle, Touchstone, Apothecary, Species, and other journals and zines. Her book Vodka Mountain or I’m Bad at This Game will be released in September by Vegetarian Alcoholic. Her poems can be found online at http://bukowskirat.blogspot.com

Take a cha-cha-cha-chance,
The Fool's

Mother Fool's
1101 Williamson St.
Madison, WI 53703

608 259-1301 - cafe
608 259-1030 - office

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