Elizabethtown College’s Bowers Writers House, next week, is hosting a lawyer, a medical doctor, a creative writing professor, an essayist and a novelist.
And this is just one person.
Author Jacob M. Appel is a scholar-in-residence at Bowers Feb. 11 through 13. His professional career is a hybrid of the arts and sciences, and he has a sprawling academic record, which includes advanced degrees in creative writing, playwriting, public health and bioethics. He’s a medical doctor and a lawyer. (See his bio for a full list of degrees and institutions.
Appel is a prolific writer, with more than 215 publishing credits, several of them award-winning, in various literary journals. Aside from his creative work, he’s widely published in the field of bioethics, in mass media outlets and in academic and trade publications.
His success in getting ink for his work is the result of tireless submitting—he’s received some “20,000 rejections” in his literary life. The more you submit, he alluded to, the more chance you have at getting published. Although the writer says that, at first, he was deeply hurt when his stories were declined, he now accepts rejection as part of the writing life. He likened it to stepping on a pin. One pin will hurt, but if you step on a whole bunch at once, it’s not as painful, he said.
When he gets notice that an editor decided to pass on a story, Appel, usually within 10 to 15 minutes, sends it back out into the world. In fact, he said, he has an endless cycle of stories in circulation in literary magazine queues.
“You have to be determined; you have to have a cycle,” he said in a phone interview. Establishing a writer career is “a long process; it’s not a one-time project every time you submit a story,” he said.
You have to be determined; you have to have a cycle…”
Appel noted that he once heard a writer give the advice that, if your work gets rejected by the same magazine three times, it’s best to move on and accept that the journal doesn’t suit your style. Appel said that sentiment is “deeply misguided,” giving an example of his own persistence. He first submitted to the Nimrod Literary Awards, given by an Oklahoma-based journal of the same name, when he was 16 years old. He was rejected by Nimrod at least 80 times. Finally, he won second place in the contest and the editor, who recognized Appel’s name, called, personally, to congratulate him.
In today’s world, one might consider getting his or her own Wikipedia entry a testament to success. But not Appel; he’s doesn’t pay much attention to what’s being said about him online. Case in point, a “crazy woman in Florida” keeps changing his birthdate to fit a story “that I was her family doctor.” And someone else removed correct information about his hometown, to which he said, “I can prove it. I was in Mrs. Holcum’s nursery school class in Bradford, Conn. And they will remember me because I bit the kid that sat next to me.”
These instances of false information being added, online, and correct information being removed taught him “… not to believe anything on the Internet. There are doctors out there who prescribe based [on what they read]; it’s a disaster waiting to happen,” he said, admitting that the Internet is not all bad.
During his time as scholar-in-residence at Elizabethtown, Appel will visit classes, and make two public appearances. The first is a lecture, “Humanities and the Richness of Being Human: A Life Dynamic With Jacob Appel” at 11 a.m. Feb. 11.. His talks usually evolve until the very time he gives them, but he can say this: “I usually start with a joke. It’ll be a good joke. Students can come just for the joke and then sneak out the back.” But, more seriously, he said that there often is disconnect between “the academy and the world,” that there is richer meaning in to which we pay attention
“[In liberal arts education] we are really good at taking things apart but not as good as putting them back together,” he said, adding that the latter is what he likes to focus on when he talks about interdisciplinary experiences
His second appearance, a fiction reading, is at 8 p.m. Friday, Feb. 13. While he’s not quite sure what he’ll read (he has a massive repertoire), one of his favorites to share—if time allows—is the story of a depressed hedgehog, loosely based on a couple he knew who adopted one of these quilled creatures. Hedgehogs, he said, do experience mental illness. When E-town NOW asked why, he said, “The hedgehog is not forthcoming with an explanation.”
In addition to short stories and his professional, medical-based articles, Appel also writes nonfiction and is a playwright. His essay collection, Phoning Home, bounces between real-life bioethics cases and his life—and how the two connect. Playwriting, he said, is the most challenging form of writing he does—it’s labor intensive and involves many people: actors, directors, producers, crew members—it’s the most fun and rewarding because he can see the audience respond. “It’s magically exciting,” he said.
When posed with the notion that, “yeah, it would be creepy for a novelist to watch someone read a book from across the living room,” he responded with a laugh, “One day we will put cameras in books. It’s only a matter of time.”
When it comes to academics, Appel said he has two particular interests: bioethics and medical humanities. “There was no formal path” to education in these highly interdisciplinary fields, he said, so he forged his own path: His medical and law degrees “shed light in one way or another” in those areas, he said. In one of his many “lives” Appel teaches creative writing to medical students—but not narrative medicine. “I’m interested in teaching them to talk to a larger, lay public,” he said, adding that it’s a challenge to get med students to submit their work to journals, but it’s gratifying when students make the revelation that they can write.
In his own fiction writing, however, he prefers to escape the world of medicine. The central character in his novel The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up is a botanist; an area of science with which Appel was not familiar.
“I knew that plants were green and didn’t talk,” he joked, adding that now, after writing the book, he has learned a lot about vegetation
But learning—that’s kind of his thing.
“School is more fun than work,” he said.