We haven’t heard from Fireside Follies since mid-January, but that doesn’t mean that great literary and arts fun has disappeared from Bushwick. Fireside Follies returns this Saturday, March 19, at 7 pm, to their regular home base, Brooklyn Fireproof, presenting cartoonist collective Pizza Island.

Bushwick Daily was curious what inspired Fireside Follies to switch from curating a reading series to throwing a comics and music party. We chatted with Mike Lala, a poet and a co-curator of the event.

Mike explained that Julia Wertz (The Fart Party, Drinking at Movies) was one of the readers at January’s Fireside Follies and her comics full of edgy humor and self-irony, received such a huge response, that they decided to team up with a collective, Pizza Island, and organize an event around comics. The all-female cartoonist collective is based in Greenpoint, and the girls will be reading and projecting their comics.

The event will also feature music from the production of David Heatley and Jeffrey Lewis.

In the good Fireside Follies spirit, admission is free, but donations are welcomed.

When talking with Mike, he leaked some  information that Pizza Island is not an abandoned island in the sea of Bushwick…  Soon we will have a brand new series to look forward to, called Yr Friday Nite. Fireside Follies plans to bring together writers, painters and installation artists, video and performance artists, photographers and musicians, not to fit a theme for the night, but because they work so well together.