"Row, Dole Apologizes to Galassi"

Date: March 16, 2012
Authors: Cuny Writers’ Institute students -- Caroline Seklir, Destanie McAllister, Thomas Lin, Sultana Banulescu
Venue: KGB
Free Drinks: Depends On Lou’s mood
Q & A: no
Book signed: NA
UE check number: benefits ended

Just because a stupid idea works, doesn't make it a smart idea. The intersection of this blog, whose purpose is to get me a book deal, and Jonathan Galassi, presented me with a situation that I mishandled.
I should not have let somebody's title obscure the person. I just opened Alice McDermott's "At Weddings and Wakes" and saw on its dedication page "to Jonathan Galassi, as ever."
Odd that Alice McDermott didn't feel the need to trick Galassi into sitting down at her table and then hyperventilate about it for 1,200 words. She wrote a book; he worked on it with her. That's his job. The fact that he has administrative skills in addition is no reason to, well, you get the idea. I apologize.
I didn't want to not describe the other readers at last Friday's Cuny Writers' Institute. Destanie McAllister followed opening act, Caroline Seklir, with solid piece. The third reader was Sultana Banulescu who read from her story about a French teacher. It captured the feel of provincial town in Eastern Europe and the conflicts the title character faced after landing there.
The final reader, Thomas Lin, delivered a virtuoso account of Thomas Edison as a young man.
It's not quite true that Galassi didn't utter a single sentence to me. At one point, I told him that I knew some of the students in the Writers' Institute program. I pointed out one of them, Kelly Aronowitz, and said I knew her a little from going to a lot of the same readings. Galassi said, "She's from Mexico."