The Detroit Writing Room Book Club

Become a Detroit Writing Room Book Club Member, and get access to 6 intimate author talks from January to June 2022!

Members have the opportunity to meet each author during a meet-and-greet and ask questions during an open Q&A. Book club members also receive promo codes for book discounts of 30% off, opportunities to win signed copies and more!

The book talks are held virtually on Zoom from 7 - 8 p.m. EST the last Tuesday of every month. Members will receive the Zoom link the morning of each event. They will also receive the video recap. 

Featured authors include:

January 25 - Harvey Ovshinsky, Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling

February 22 - Jean Alicia Elster, How It Happens

March 29 - Emita Hill, Northern Harvest

April 26 - Peter Markus, When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds & Cindy Hunter Morgan, Far Company

May 31 - Frances Kai-Hwa Wang, You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair is in Braids

June 28 - W.S. Penn, Raising Bean: Essays on Laughing and Living

BONUS EVENT FOR BOOK CLUB MEMBERS!

July 26 - John Gallagher, Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City

Pricing:

Membership is $60.

Non-members can purchase single tickets for each book talk. Admission is $15.

Memberships can be gifted for the holidays, birthdays or other celebratory occasions! If gifting a membership, please email hello@detroitwritingroom.com to provide the recipient’s name and email so we can send them the Zoom invites!

Meet the Featured Authors

“Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling” is a deeply personal and intimate memoir told through the lens of Harvey Ovshinsky’s lifetime of adventures as an urban enthusiast. He was only seventeen when he started The Fifth Estate, one of the country’s oldest underground newspapers. Five years later, he became one of the country’s youngest news directors in commercial radio at WABX-FM, Detroit’s notorious progressive rock station. Both jobs placed Ovshinsky directly in the bullseye of the nation’s tumultuous counterculture of the 1960s and 70s. When he became a documentary director, Ovshinsky’s dispatches from his hometown were awarded broadcasting’s highest honors, including a national Emmy, a Peabody and the American Film Institute’s Robert M. Bennett Award for Excellence.

But this memoir is more than a boastful trip down memory lane. It also doubles as a survival guide and an instruction manual that speaks not only to the nature of and need for storytelling but also and equally important, the pivotal role the twin powers of endurance and resilience play in the creative process. You don’t have to be a writer, an artist, or even especially creative to take the plunge, Ovshinsky reminds his readers. "You just have to feel strongly about something or have something you need to get off your chest. And then find the courage to scratch your own surface and share your good stuff with others." Order here.

About the Author:

Ovshinsky is an educator, known for his passionate support of and commitment to mentoring the next generation of urban storytellers. When he wasn’t teaching screenwriting and documentary production in his popular workshops and support groups, he taught undergraduate and graduate students at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, Wayne State University, Madonna University, and Washtenaw Community College. "The thing about Harvey," a colleague recalls in “Scratching the Surface,” "is that he treats his students like professionals and not like newbies at all. His approach is to, in a very supportive and non-threatening way, combine both introductory and advanced storytelling in one fell swoop."

“How It Happens” follows the story of author Jean Alicia Elster’s maternal grandmother, Dorothy May Jackson. Born in Tennessee in 1890, Dorothy May was the middle daughter of Addie Jackson, a married African-American housekeeper at one of the white boardinghouses in town, and Tom Mitchell, a commanding white attorney from a prominent family. Through three successive generations of African-American women, Elster intertwines the fictionalized adaptations of the defining periods and challenges — race relations, miscegenation, sexual assault and class divisions — in her family’s history.

A continuation of the plots begun in Elster’s two novels “Who’s Jim Hines?” and “The Colored Car,” “How It Happens” continues the story for an older audience and begins with Addie’s life before the turn of the century in the South as a married Black woman with three biracial daughters navigating the relationship between her husband and Tom Mitchell. Later the story shifts to Addie’s daughter Dorothy May’s experiences both as a child and later, as a teacher who, choosing between her career and marriage to a man she barely knows, moves to Detroit. The story moves along with Dorothy May’s daughter Jean, who, with the support of her mother and the memory of her grandmother, confronts and comes to terms with her role in society and the options available to her as a college-educated Black woman in the post–World War II industrial North. While there is struggle and hardship for each of these women, they each build off one other and continue to demand space in the world in which they live.

Written for young adult readers, “How It Happens” carries the heart through the obstacles that still face women of color today and persists in holding open the door of communication between generations. Order here.

About the Author:
A 2017 Kresge artist fellow and a former attorney, Jean Alicia Elster is a professional writer of fiction for children and young adults. She is the great-granddaughter of Addie Jackson, whose family story is the basis of “How It Happens.” Elster is the author of the Michigan Notable Books “Who’s Jim Hines?” (Wayne State University Press, 2008) and “The Colored Car” (Wayne State University Press, 2013).

“Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming” looks at the female culinary pioneers who have put northern Michigan on the map for food, drink and farming. Emita Brady Hill interviews women who share their own stories of becoming the cooks, bakers, chefs and farmers that they are today — each even sharing a delicious recipe or two. These stories are as important to tracing the gastronomic landscape in America as they are to honoring the history, agriculture and community of Michigan.

Divided into six sections, “Northern Harvest” celebrates very different women who converged in an important region of Michigan and helped transform it into the flourishing culinary Eden it is today. Hill speaks with orchardists and farmers about planting their own fruit trees and making the decision to transition their farms over to organic. She hears from growers who have been challenged by the northern climate and have made exclusive use of fair trade products in their business. Readers are introduced to the first-ever cheesemaker in the Leelanau area and a pastry chef who is doing it all from scratch. Readers also get a sneak peek into the origins of Traverse City institutions such as Folgarelli’s Market and Wine Shop and Trattoria Stella. Hill catches up with local cookbook authors and nationally known food writers. She interviews the founder of two historic homesteads that introduce visitors to a way of living many of us only know from history books.

These oral histories allow each woman to tell her story as she chooses, in her own words, with her own emphasis, and her own discretion or indiscretions. “Northern Harvest” is a celebration of northern Michigan’s rich culinary tradition and the women who made it so. Hungry readers will swallow this book whole. Order here.

About the Author:
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, the youngest of five sisters, Emita Hill has summered in Traverse City, Michigan, and known and loved this region from her earliest childhood until today. Her career as a scholar of the French Enlightenment took her to France where she discovered French and North African cuisines, an interest that led to her study of the many aspects of food and farming in Michigan that are the subject of this book.  A professor and administrator at Lehman College in the Bronx for twenty years, she then served as chancellor of Indiana University Kokomo and subsequently was a trustee for two international universities, AUCA in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and SEEU in Tetovo, Macedonia. She published extensively in her academic field, but then turned to oral history. ”Bronx Faces and Voices,” published in 2014, presents the stories of sixteen men and women who survived the years of arson and abandonment in the Bronx and helped to sustain and rebuild their borough and their community. “Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming” includes the stories of women farmers, orchardists, restaurateurs, chocolate and cheese specialists, bakers and food writers. Emita loves oral history because the men and women in her books tell their stories in their own words, making it very personal.  She earned her doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University and in 2019 was awarded an honorary doctorate in humane letters by Indiana University.

Emita has three children, seven grandchildren and two great grandchildren.  Her constant companion since the start of the pandemic is a little miniature poodle named Brioche. She loves reading and being an author, but she also loves tennis, swimming, scuba and ballroom dancing.

Over the course of two decades and six books, Peter Markus has been making fiction out of a lexicon shaped by the words brother and fish and mud. In an essay on Markus’s work, Brian Evenson writes, "If it’s not clear by now, Markus’s use of English is quite unique. It is instead a sort of ritual speech, an almost religious invocation in which words themselves, through repetition, acquire a magic or power that revives the simpler, blunter world of childhood." Now, in his debut book of poems, “When Our Fathers Return to Us as Birds,” Markus tunes his eye and ear toward a new world, a world where father is the new brother, a world where the father’s slow dying and eventual death leads Markus, the son, to take a walk outside to "meet my shadow in the deepening shade."

In this collection, a son is simultaneously caring for his father, losing his father and finding his dead father in the trees and the water and the sky. He finds solace in the birds and in the river that runs between his house and his parents’ house, with its view of the shut-down steel mill on the river's other side, now in the process of being torn down. The book is steadily punctuated by this recurring sentence that the son wakes up to each day: My father is dying in a house across the river. The rhythmic and recursive nature to these poems places the reader right alongside the son as he navigates his journey of mourning.

These are poems written in conversation with the poems of Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, Jim Harrison, Jane Kenyon, Raymond Carver, Theodore Roethke too —npoets whose poems at times taught Markus how to speak. "In a dark time . . .," we often hear it said, "there are no words." But the truth is, there are always words. Sometimes our words are all we have to hold onto, to help us see through the darkened woods and muddy waters, times when the ear begins to listen, the eye begins to see, and the mouth, the body, and the heart, in chorus, begin to speak. Fans of Markus’s work and all of those who are caring for dying parents or grieving their loss will find comfort, kinship and appreciation in this honest and beautiful collection. Order here.

About the Author:

Peter Markus is the author of the novel “Bob, or Man on Boat,” as well as the books of short fiction “We Make Mud” and “The Fish and the Not Fish,” which was selected as a Michigan Notable Book in 2015. Other books include “Inside My Pencil: Teaching Poetry in Detroit Public Schools,” about the work that Markus has been doing for the past two-and-a-half decades with InsideOut Literary Arts. Over the years he has published his work in such literary journals as Iowa Review, Chicago Review, Black Warrior Review, Massachusetts Review, Quarterly West, Alaska Quarterly Review, Willow Springs, Seattle Review, BOMB, Fairy Tale Review, Notre Dame Review, Kenyon Review, among others. In 2012 he was named a Kresge fellow in Literary Arts and in 2015 he received the Teaching Excellence Award from Oakland University where he's been teaching since 2013.

In “Far Company,” we hear Cindy Hunter Morgan thinking about the many ways we carry the natural world inside of us as a kind of embedded cartography. Many of these poems commune not only with lost ancestors but also past poets. We hear conversations with Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Walt Whitman and W. S. Merwin. These poets, who are part of Hunter Morgan’s poetic lineage, are beloved figures in the far company she keeps, but the poems she writes are distinctly hers. Poet Larissa Szporluk remarked, "The poems in this collection are quiet and deceptively simple. My first response was to be amazed by a seeming innocence in delivery — straightforward, picturesque and compassionate — that then matured like a crystal into something precious and masterful. We are left with the whole forest having met all the trees one by one. There is so much respect in this collection — respect for natural processes that include intergenerational relationships, shared territories and myths."

The poems in “Far Company” reveal a mind and a heart negotiating both self and world with compassion and invention. They are cinematic in the way they navigate loss, memory, dislocation, hope and love — abstractions evoked in deeply specific and nuanced ways. There is the drone that flies over Hunter Morgan’s grandparents’ farm before the house burns and the stag-handled knife in a pocket, its single blade "folded inside like a secret" on a train in Greece. But this collection is full of quieter cinema, too — a grandfather bending to cinch the girth of a horse, days "green / with snap peas and wild tendrils," and "raindrops beading like sweat / on the lips of snapdragons." The root of this book is Hunter Morgan’s love for family and her love for the land her family has shared.

These poems map a journey to many places, inward and outward, and engage with the natural world and the built world, moving between both of those environments in ways that acknowledge the complexities of such crossings. Often melancholic but never sentimental, this collection belongs with any reader who seeks out literature in the organic world. Order here.

About the Author:

Cindy Hunter Morgan is the author of “Harborless” (Wayne State University Press, 2017) and two chapbooks: “Apple Season” and “The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker.” “Harborless” was a 2018 Michigan Notable Book and the winner of the 2017 Moveen Prize in Poetry.

In the aftermath of a messy divorce, Frances Kai-Hwa Wang writes in the hope of beginning to build a new life with four children, bossy aunties, unreliable suitors and an uncertain political landscape. The lyric essays in “You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids” deftly navigate the space between cultures and reflect on lessons learned from both Asian American elders and young multiracial children, punctuated by moments rich with cultural and linguistic nuance. In her prologue, Wang explains, "Buddhists say that suffering comes from unsatisfied desire, so for years I tried to close the door to desire. I was so successful, I not only closed the door, I locked it, barred it, nailed it shut, then stacked a bunch of furniture in front of it. And now that door is open, wide open, and all my insides are spilling out."

Full of current events of the day and #HashtagsOfTheMoment, the topics in the collection are wide ranging, including cooking food to show love, surviving Chinese School, being an underpaid lecturer, defending against yellow dildos, navigating immigration issues, finding love in a time of elections, crying with children separated from their parents at the border, charting the landscape of frugal/hoarder elders during the pandemic, witnessing COVID-inspired anti–Asian American violence while reflecting on the death of Vincent Chin, teaching her sixteen-year-old son to drive after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and George Floyd, and trusting the power of writing herself into existence. Within these lyric essays, some of which are accompanied by artwork and art installations, Wang finds the courage and hope to speak out for herself and for an entire generation of Asian American women.

A notable work in the landscape of Asian American literature as well as Midwest and Michigan-based literature, “You Cannot Resist Me When My Hair Is in Braids” features a clear and powerful voice that brings all people together in these political and pandemic times. Order here.

About the Author:
Frances Kai-Hwa Wang is an award-winning poet, essayist, journalist, activist focused on issues of Asian America, race, justice and the arts. Her writing has appeared at NBCAsianAmerica, PRIGlobalNation, Center for Asian American Media, Detroit Journalism Cooperative, Cha Asian Literary Journal, Kartika Review, Drunken Boat, Joao Roque Literary Journal. She co-created a multimedia artwork for Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and she is a Knight Arts Challenge Detroit artist.

“Raising Bean” is a collection of narrative essays by W. S. Penn, a mixed-blood Native American writer. Penn’s essays are conversations with his granddaughter, who is lovingly referred to as "Bean," and now made available to a larger audience. Offered in the oral traditions of the Nez Perce, with satirical wit or a Native perspective on a range of ideas and events, Penn’s objective was to guide Bean toward adulthood while confronting society’s interest in possessions, fairness and status. Drawing on his own family history and Native mythology, Penn charts a way through life where each endeavor is a journey — an opportunity to love, to learn, or to interact — rather than the means to a prize at the end.

Divided into five parts, Penn addresses topics such as the power of words, race and identity, school and how to be. In the essay "In the Nick of Names," Penn takes an amused look at the words we use for people and how their power, real or imagined, can alter our perception of an entire group. "To Have and On Hold" is an essay about wanting to assimilate into a group but at the risk of losing a good bit of yourself. "A Harvest Moon" is a humorous anecdote about a Native grandfather visiting his granddaughter’s classroom and the absurdities of being a professional Indian. "Not Nobody" uses "Be All that You Can Be Week" at Bean’s school to reveal the lessons and advantages of being a "nobody." In "From Paper to Person," Penn imagines the joy that may come to Bean when she spends time with her Paper People — three-foot-tall drawings, mounted on stiff cardboard — and as she grows into a young woman like her mom, able to say she is a person who is happy with what she has and not sorry for what she doesn’t.

Comical and engaging, the essays in “Raising Bean” will appeal to readers of all backgrounds and interests, especially those with a curiosity in language, perception, humor and the ways in which Native people guide their families and friends with stories. Order here.

About the Author:

W.S. Penn is an emeritus professor from Michigan State University in creative writing. A past winner of the North American Indian Prose Award and the Stephen Crane Prize, he was a founder of the Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers with Lee Francis and others. He has published several novels, short stories and collections of essays of which “Raising Bean: Essays on Laughing and Living” is the most recent. Generally, he feels about his own writing the way a good cook may feel about his or her own cooking that, tasting it, he thinks, "I might have added a little of this or I might have reduced that," while he hopes his reader will still enjoy it. He continues to write, and being older than he ever thought he'd be, he does what all old men do — he golfs.

Experts estimate that perhaps forty square miles of Detroit are vacant-from a quarter to a third of the city — a level of emptiness that creates a landscape unlike any other big city. Author John Gallagher, who covered urban redevelopment for the Detroit Free Press for decades, spent a year researching what is going on in Detroit precisely because of its open space and the dire economic times we face. Instead of presenting another account of the city's decline, “Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City” showcases the innovative community-building work happening in the city and focuses on what else can be done to make Detroit leaner, greener and more economically self-sufficient.

Gallagher conducted numerous interviews, visited community projects and took many of the photographs that accompany the text to uncover some of the strategies that are being used, and could be used in the future, to make twenty-first century Detroit a more sustainable and desirable place to live. Some of the topics Gallagher discusses are urban agriculture, restoring vacant lots, reconfiguring Detroit's overbuilt road network, and reestablishing some of the city's original natural landscape. He also investigates new models for governing the city and fostering a more entrepreneurial economy to ensure a more stable political and economic future. Along the way, Gallagher introduces readers to innovative projects that are already under way in the city and proposes other models for possible solutions-from as far away as Dresden, Germany, and Seoul, South Korea, and as close to home as Philadelphia and Youngstown-to complement current efforts.

Ultimately, Gallagher helps to promote progressive ideas and the community leaders advancing them and offers guidance for other places dealing with the shrinking cities phenomenon. Readers interested in urban studies and environmental issues will enjoy the fresh perspective of “Reimagining Detroit.” Order here.

About the Author:

John Gallagher is a veteran journalist and author who spent 32 years writing for the Detroit Free Press as a reporter and columnist covering Detroit’s redevelopment efforts. His book “Reimagining Detroit: Opportunities for Redefining an American City,” was named by the Huffington Post among the best social and political books of 2010. His more recent books include “Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity” and “The Englishman and Detroit: A British Entrepreneur Helps Restore a City’s Confidence.” Born in New York City, John was educated at DePaul University in Chicago and Columbia University in New York. John and his wife, Sheu-Jane, live along Detroit’s east riverfront.

About Wayne State University Press

Wayne State University Press is a distinctive urban publisher committed to supporting its parent institution’s core research, teaching and service mission by generating high-quality scholarly and general interest works of global importance. Through its publishing program, the Press disseminates research, advances education and serves the local community while expanding the international reputation of the Press and the University.