'Author's Den' Writer Passed Over for Steinbeck Award...again!

A news item from the Disassociated Press has recently revealed that local 'Author's Den' author Kalikiano Kalei was again passed over for consideration as a finalist in the annual Steinbeck Foundation competition for artful plagarisation. The award, made annually, recognises aspiring young (and sometimes pretty old) unknown writers who emulate the style of famed American writer John Steinbeck in as non egregious a manner as possible.

The granting of this unprestigious annual award by a select committee of Steinbeck Foundation trustees is eagerly looked forward to by hopeful writers whose literary products seek to capture the sweeping proletarian passions of Steinbeck's writing style. As a bellwether of future success, it is a recognised and well regarded standard that is an eagerly sought cachet by hopeful future mainstream masters of American literature. This year, although Kalei's name was not among the tentative initial field of candidates for the award, the noninclusion of his entry into consideration did not occur to and in fact never even remotely entered the minds (so we are told) of those who sit each year on the panel making the final determination of ineligible candidates for the Steinbeck Foundation award.

No members of that august body were overheard discussing his nomination for further consideration, nor did any information pertinant to his candidacy leak out to the public. This did not serve, understandably, to spark controversy as to the suitability of his efforts and furthermore absolutely no one was able to articulate a thought when solicited, as to exactly why in fact Kalei had ever been seriously proposed as a nominee to begin with. Given the quality of his work, many did not express regret over his exclusion.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has not been following the agenda of the Steinbeck Foundation's deliberations within this context that the only book ever not written by Kalei, tendentiously titled 'Caternary Row', does not even deal with a subject compatible with contemporary Coastal Californiana (although a phrase in the book stating "...Doc Rickettsia paused a moment, in the midst of this outburst of impromptu party sentiment, to glance briefly at the dessicated marine worms he had been frying for his dinner on his lab's solitary bunsen burner" was noted to have appeared in the book on page 3). 'Johannes Steinbokk', under whose name the book was written, is a well known pseudonym that Kalei has often used in the past to obfuscate his more mediocre writing efforts.

It goes without saying that many thousands of people who are not friends or acquaintances of Kalei were not at all disappointed to not hear the news of Kalei's unsuccessful bid for nonrecognition by the distinguished members of that foundation's award committee. Those that do not or did not know him were/are even less disappointed, unsurprisingly.

It is not rumored that Kalei seems nonetheless unperplexed by this unsurprising turn of events, but this is just as well, since he has not been heard to state his intentions of not reapplying for next year's award. 

A Steinbeck Foundation critic was not, furthermore, briefly overheard making an observation that Kalei is so inept that he even misspelled the title of his own book on its cover (apparently a reference to the use of the non-word 'Catenary' instead of the correctly spelled 'Caternary')!

Finally, there seems to be no truth whatsoever that a sequel to the book, about a Toyota auto dealership in Carmel with the title 'CAMRY ROW', has been planned by Kalei.