"Me Again, W,R. My roommate received her contributor's copy of Cutbank today, and guess who's in it! If you guessed our very own Jacob Appel, you'd be correct. He won their yearly prize...not a surprise...but, and here's the kicker, he won their yearly creative NONFICTION prize. It looks as though Appelonius is branching out. Who knew? Soon none of us will be safe. Got to admire the fellow. And stop him."
6 comments:
This is not so much branching out as adding a small twig to a tree so overgrown with branches it towers over the rest of the forest.
The man has two master's degrees, a law degree, a medical degree, is a noted bioethicist and commentator on various topics and, oh, one of the most decorated writers devoted to the short story form writing today.
Then I found out he's a year younger than me.
I am still waiting to learn the flaw that will make me feel better about myself. Does he have eleven toes? Does he secretly pluck away a monobrow every night? Does he at least get his salad and dinner forks mixed up (sometimes)?
He lost the Hudson Prize, though. Four entries in the finalist and semi-finalist's list. I was shocked.
I got a copy of that journal, too, and on a separate note from Appelonius: that journal sucked. Not only was most of the writing the kind of academic-only, self-indulgent, language-barf I've come to expect from literary journals...but it was basically just Xeroxed and stapled together (as though by an undergrad working an unpaid internship). Dudes.
Yeah, when I looked him up on Wikipedia I was appalled. I still have college tuition sticker shock just from looking at his resume. You think somebody at one of those universities would have said: "Okay, a law degree, a medical degree, a doctorate (in everything), GO AWAY we're done with you!"
It's kind of like trying to wrap your brain around the idea Rachel Maddow was a Rhodes Scholar when she was 19 years old.
I like to think that he's several small aliens standing on each other's shoulders and wearing a human suit.
He does not have a doctorate. He had to withdraw from Columbia's PhD program to go to their medical school.
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