Meet Author Harvey Ovshinsky in Virtual Event About New Memoir, ‘Scratching the Surface’

The Ferndale Library is hosting a virtual meet-the-author event featuring Harvey Ovshinsky on Thursday, May 6, with a moderated discussion about his new memoir, Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling, including a live Q&A session with attendees. The Ferndale Library has been regularly featuring interviews with local authors through its podcast, but this will be a special live event for pre-registered audience members to join Ovshinsky live, with library staff, to hear about the experience of writing his memoir and more details about his extraordinary "adventures," Thursday, May 6 at 6:30 pm via Zoom.

Scratching the Surface: Adventures in Storytelling spans five exciting decades of Harvey Ovshinsky's roles as a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and teacher. Ovshinsky 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. Later, he would get further into the medium of storytelling, working with outlets such as DPTV and WDIV, working as a producer right alongside local news icons like Mort Crim. 

Ovshinsky knows what it's like to live in the bullseye of the nation's tumultuous counterculture of the 1960s and 70s, and several of his anecdotes will cover that at this upcoming virtual event. Ovshinsky would receive broadcasting's highest honors as a documentary filmmaker, including a national Emmy, a Peabody, and the American Film Institute's Robert M. Bennett Award for Excellence.

Scratching the Surface was written to serve as both a survival guide and an instruction manual, speaking not only to the nature of and need for storytelling but also (and just as importantly) how much the creative process requires exceptional endurance and resilience. As Ovshinsky will tell you, you don't have to be a writer, an artist, or even especially creative to take the plunge into the form of storytelling. Join the Ferndale Library on May 6, where Ovshinsky will tell his own stories but also inspire attendees to start telling their own!

Sign up online at https://tinyurl.com/fadlkho