Jacob Appel has over 80 short stories published or forthcoming in journals such as Agni, Alaska Quarterly Review, Arts and Letters, Boston Review, Confrontation, Florida Review, Fugue, Gulfstream, Harpur Palate, Iowa Review, Inkwell, Michigan Quarterly Review, Missouri Review, Nebraska Review, New Millennium Writings, New York Stories, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, River Styx, Seattle Review, Shenandoah, StoryQuarterly, Subtropics, Third Coast, Threepenny Review, Washington Square, and West Branch. In 2001, his story “Counting” was shortlisted for the O. Henry Prize, and in 2006, his story “Fallout” received a special mention in the Pushcart Prize anthology. Jacob has won numerous contests and awards, including a Dana Award and a Sherwood Anderson Writers Grant. As a non-fiction writer, his essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and many regional newspapers. He also publishes in the field of medical ethics, and is the author of eight full-length plays that have been performed in theatres around the country. For more information, visit Jacob’s website.

You’ve amassed quite a list of publication credits, in very reputable journals, I might add. How long have you been writing? Do you have any tips, or secrets, on how to get published?

I started writing in high school. Unfortunately, when I told me career counselor that I wished to become a writer someday, she leaned over her desk with concern and suggested that I choose a “more realistic” profession. I didn’t write for more than a decade after that encounter. In my second incarnation as a writer, I’ve been writing for about twelve years…. I think that is about how long it takes to acquire the fundamentals of any art form. Mastering the form, of course, takes the remainder of one’s life.

I am increasingly confident that the secret to publication is relentlessness. Keep writing, keep sending out your work, respond to rejection by sending out even more work. If a journal sends you a note stating that your style just isn’t what they’re looking for, which has happened to me on multiple occasions, wait until that editor retires and try again. I have acquired more than 11,000 rejection letters and I’ve published fewer than one hundred stories. From a statistical point of view, I have failed abysmally. But I think few writers “fail” because they don’t have raw talent or potential; most aspiring writers don’t publish because they give up too soon.

Are you aware that the blog Literary Rejections on Display calls you the Golden Appel because you’ve won numerous contests? How do you respond to this post, and the comments it prompted?

I was both flattered and highly surprised when I was first contacted by Literary Rejections on Display. The truth is that there are a number of other writers who have won as many, if not far more, contests than I have. I suppose the anonymous curator of Literary Rejections on Display is particularly attuned to spotting my by-line….sort of how, if you learn an obscure foreign language, you suddenly discover that many other people also speak it. (I studied Dutch for many years and it shocked me that “everybody” seemed to speak Dutch, while the reality was that I was hyper-sensitive to noticing those few who did.) I do think that Literary Rejections on Display is a delightful, entertaining and witty website. I am looking forward to the day when Writer, Rejected sheds his or her anonymity so that I can invite this genius to lunch. However, I confess I haven’t spent much time reading the comments on the site. I’ve come to understand that some are less flattering than others….but I try not to take that to heart. I recognize that there are people out there who don’t care for my writing. I assure them that I’m still learning and improving–and I do hope that someday I’ll write something that suits their standards and tastes. I am also hopeful that there will someday be a parallel blog named Literary Acceptances on Display, and that I’ll be mentioned there as well.

You’re also a seriously educated guy. You have a B.A and M.A from Brown, and M.A and M.Phil from Columbia, a M.F.A in creative writing from New York University, and, as if those weren’t enough, you have a J.D. from Harvard Law. Why so many degrees? How has your schooling benefited you? Your writing?

I love learning new things. I’m often asked whether a writer should write what he knows or what he doesn’t know–and I think the answer is to focus on the reader’s knowledge, to write what the reader doesn’t know because most people read to acquire knowledge or insight into worlds that are not familiar to them. Alas, many of my degrees are professional in nature and designed to further my career as a bioethicist. I wish very much that my work in fiction and my work in bioethics would overlap, but it does so only rarely. Someday, I’d love to merge my interests and to put together an anthology of short stories on bioethics-related themes from abortion to euthanasia. (By way of full disclosure, I should add that I’m expecting to receive my medical degree from Columbia University this coming spring). The one area where my interests do complement each other well is in teaching, which is both how I earn a living and what I love doing most. Drawing upon examples from many different fields helps one to connect with students of all backgrounds and with highly diverse interests.

I should add that my degrees generally make it more difficult to fill out standardized forms and to apply for grants. Usually, the forms ask for a list of all of one’s degrees and then provide room for only three. Clearly, an example of how the overeducated face ongoing discrimination.

You also teach fiction workshops, correct?

I’ve been teaching at the Gotham Writers Workshop in New York City for approximately eight years now. I like Gotham’s distinctive method and I am always impressed with the high quality of the students. Quite a number of my former students have now gone on to MFAs and to publishing in the literary journals. Two of them in particular, Chanan Tigay and Christie Hauser, are destined to become literary stars. That brings me a great deal of satisfaction. I was fortunate enough to have many brilliant writing teachers over the years–among them the essayist Andre Aciman at NYU, the playwright Tina Howe at Hunter College, and Julie Leerburger of Scarsdale High School–and I think it’s very important to pass along both wisdom and enthusiasm to the next generation of writers. Teaching writing is probably the most rewarding job in the world. Occasionally, I’ll hear an established but not yet financially successful author complaining of his or her teaching duties…and it saddens me profoundly. I feel bad for that writer’s students, but I also feel bad for anyone who views sharing their literary knowledge as a burden.

How do you find the time to write as much as you do?

I can’t speak for all writers, but I approach writing as my top professional priority in life. My job is to write every day, no matter how tired I am after a long day lecturing on bioethics or working at the hospital, even if I manage to produce only a couple of sentences. Writing is a full-time job….twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week…because I’m always looking for story ideas or combing the world for precious details or moments. Most people take Christmas and Thanksgiving off from work–but to a writer, a family’s holiday dinner is prime observation time. That being said, it’s easy to write every day when you love writing. The challenge I often have is finding time “not to write”–in other words, sacrificing my writing time to attend to other quotidian tasks such as changing the light bulbs. Sometimes, I find myself typing in the dark for several days before I’m willing to make such a concession.

Tell us about the short story collection you’re putting together.

The story collection I’m working on is tentatively called “Creve Coeur” after the fictional city in Rhode Island where the stories take place. I started writing the stories in this particular collection at a moment when several people very close to me, including my grandfather, were dying. As a result, a deep sense of loss seems to permeate the writing. I am very hopeful that I will publish a collection someday–and even that the market for fiction collections will improve. However, my great regret in life–I’m not even forty, and already I can sense this to be the case–is that my grandfather never had an opportunity to witness me publish a book. He was quite a remarkable man, a Belgian by birth, a jeweler by trade, a refugee who never lost his good humor or his love of his fellow human beings, and he taught me the great pride a craftsman can have in his work. I suspect that is why the stories in “Creve Coeur” are focused on the travails and triumphs of similar skilled workers–locksmiths and barbers and diamond cutters. The one luxury of having published over eighty stories, and written at least another fifty, is that if I can ever manage to sell one short story collection, I’ll have another ten waiting right behind it. A colleague recently pointed out to me that I may be the most widely-published and honored short story writer in the country without a published book. She meant this as a compliment–but I am not so sure this is an achievement to be proud of.

You’re working on a novel, as well. Any hints as to what it’s about?

As soon as I figure out what it’s about, you’ll be the first to know. All I’m confident of for certain is that it’s a love story because, the more I write, the more I become convinced that those are the stories most worth telling. Right now, it also involves an amateur historian who discovers that the American Civil War never took place, that the entire conflict is a colossal hoax perpetrated by a cast of hundreds…but that may change in the final version. Every time I sit down to work on it, I find myself thinking that maybe I should be writing a Broadway musical instead…trying to put music and lyrics together. Now that takes real talent! What I have learned in the process is that writing a novel is as distinct an art form from writing a short story as it is from writing a series of show tunes…or even designing a house. If only the task were as simple as stringing together ten short stories or three novellas and calling the finished product a novel…but, for better or worse, novel writing appears to be an entirely different skill. I believe that it was Somerset Maugham who said that there are three rules to writing a novel–but nobody knows what they are. As for me, I’m not even sure that there are three rules….My deepest fear is that we’ll do a follow-up interview in ten years, shortly after you win a well-deserved Pulitzer, and I still won’t be sure what my novel is about.

Let’s talk about your playwriting. You’ve written eight full-length plays that have been performed around the country. How did you become interested in this art form? How involved are you in production?

As a child, my parents–who in every other way are wonderful, generous human beings–never once took me to the theater. Okay, maybe once….I have vague recollections of my father receiving free tickets to The Sound of Music. So I can’t begin to express the sheer wonder I experienced when I moved back to New York City after college and started accompanying friends to off-Broadway and off-off-Broadway performances. At first, it never crossed my mind that I too could write plays of my own….but as my friends who write for theater started going to rehearsals and openings, surrounded by like-minded souls, while I searched (often futilely) for literary journals containing my stories in the obscure recesses of out-of-the-way bookshops, it struck me that playwrights might have the better half of the literary bargain. In my opinion, the only experience more magical than seeing a play on stage is seeing ones own play on stage. That being said, I find it far more challenging to write a play than to write a story. You have fewer tools–and far more opportunities to make a fool of yourself in front of large audiences. Maybe that’s why I am so grateful when total strangers agree to bring my plays to life. I try to go to at least one performance of every staging of one my plays, which for a person who dreads flying in airplanes is quite a challenge, but I’ve recently driven from New York City to Detroit and to Indianapolis and to Columbus to pay tribute to the theater companies that have been willing to put their faith in what I’ve written. So far, I’ve never taken much of a role in the production process. There’s a certain thrill to being surprised–and I’m rarely, if ever, disappointed. Each version of any particular play can manifest itself in thousands of different ways–that’s a good portion of the fun. And then there’s the dream that you’ll walk into the theater and suddenly discover that you’ve created something bordering on perfection, like Sarah Ruhl’s “Eurydice” or Rich Espey’s “Hope’s Arbor”….Someday! In any case, I have a new play, The Replacement, opening at the Intentional Theatre in Waterford, Connecticut, in early October, so I’m feeling very hopeful.

Is there a particular subject your plays explore?

I think one of the defining features of my plays is that they are constructed around strong female characters. There is an ongoing debate, which I largely try to stay away from, about the degree to which structural sexism prevents female playwrights from having access to major New York and regional theaters. What I personally find puzzling, and somewhat disturbing, is that the vast majority of modern plays written by both men and women feature men–usually middle-aged white men–in the leading roles. This is particularly strange when women compose both a majority of aspiring actors in New York City and the majority of theater-goers. Beyond issues of gender, I think many of my plays focus on issues of aging or dying, and several take place in hospitals and nursing homes. This is probably the bioethicist in me fighting for attention. However, I’ve also just completed a reworking of the Helen of Troy myth, presented from Helen’s point of view, and a play about an African-American ornithologist’s quest to be the woman who “rediscovers” the long-believed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, so I can’t say that I’ve really carved out a distinctive niche for myself yet.

You’re a licensed sightseeing guide in New York City. What is your favorite “unknown” place to show people?

That’s an easy question. There’s an obscure monument on Riverside Drive, just north of Grant’s Tomb, that was erected in the late eighteenth century to commemorate the death of an “amiable” child, St. Clair Pollack, a four-year-old kid who likely fell into the Hudson River near that location and drowned. Private citizens make pilgrimages to the monument and leave small mementos–St. Christopher medals and old coins and roses and ribbons and unlit votive candles. I’ve always thought it quite remarkable that so many ordinary New Yorkers take the time to pay their respects to a child who died more than two centuries ago–back when this neighborhood was farmland and strawberry patches. (Everybody has a particular field of expertise in the world–ranging from nuclear physics to American literature. I can safely say that I know more about the “amiable child” monument than any other living human being–and I challenge anyone to prove otherwise). I’ve actually written a short essay about the site, describing the time I spent there after the attacks of 9-11, but it has yet to find a home.

What would you like to take on next, in writing and/or in life?

I would like to be appointed poet laureate of the Galapagos Islands. (If anybody with pull in the Ecuadorian capital happens to read this, I’d greatly appreciate their exerting their efforts on my behalf.) However, until that happens, I think I’ll stick to writing short stories…. another eighty or so, and I might just get the hang of it.

Contact Jacob: jacobmappel AT gmail DOT com

Read:
“Hazardous Cargoes”
published in New Millennium Writings

“The Ataturk of the Outer Boroughs”
published in Storyglossia

“Natural Selection”
published by SFWP

“The Empress of Charcoal”
published by Harpur Palate