Serious Amateurs: A Harvard Writers' Group for the San Francisco Bay Area
The group will meet twice or three times per month, on Monday or Wednesday evenings, for a total of ten meetings. (An extra meeting or two might be added at the group's discretion.) We'll begin in May and wrap up in August.
By David Landau
"Amateur" is an essential title for any serious writer. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once described himself as "an amateur to the last."
"Serious Amateurs" is a workshop for the dedicated writer who commits to drafting a piece of fiction, a drama for stage or screen, a series of poems or magazine-length essays over a period of three to four months. Rather than concentrate on a single form—e.g., "a workshop for screenplays"—we adopt a more open stance that broadens the horizons of the group's activity and deepens our ownership of the larger literary field. Writers will write on deadline and submit their work for critique by group members. The task of the writer-as-writer will be to produce; while the writer-as-critic will get on the wavelength of the submitted work and give useful reaction to it.
The group will meet twice or three times per month, on Monday or Wednesday evenings, for a total of ten meetings. (An extra meeting or two might be added at the group's discretion.) We'll begin in May and wrap up in August. Venues will be private homes or, as appropriate, cafes or other public places. Fee for the series is $30 per participant, which covers snacks, drinks and occasional venue costs. Owing to the intensity of the work, we will have to stay small; so this group will be for Club members only.
If interested, please e-mail the workshop leader, David Landau (contact info given below).
Leader
David Landau (Harvard College '72) has been a recognized writer all his adult life. Four months after leaving college, he published "Kissinger: The Uses of Power," a portrait of the then-sitting advisor to the President for national security. The book achieved global renown and is still a standard text for historians and national-security analysts. Landau today is editor of Pureplay Press, which publishes books in English and Spanish. He has won two national awards for his translations of Spanish poetry and fiction. He has written for screen, TV and opera, and worked with professional-level screenwriting groups in Los Angeles. His most recent book is "Death Is Not Always the Winner," a novel about Cuba.
Contact: pureplayed@live.com