Jacob M. Appel is a man of parts. He holds a law degree but does not practice. He is a bioethicist, equal measures philosopher and clinician, who ponders the big questions of life and death. And he is a psychiatrist, working shifts at a busy New York teaching hospital, where Kirkus found him on a quick break between patients for a conversation about his work.

Given those varied careers, one marvels that Appel has the time as well to be the prolific author that he is, and across a variety of genres. Appel has written novels, short stories, books of essays, a book of poems, and 10 published plays along with pieces in more than 200 journals. That impressive body of work runs the gamut of small and large publishing houses, with his 2017 novel, Millard Salter’s Last Day (about a down-in-the-mouth psychiatrist, as it turns out), appearing through a Simon Schuster imprint and Who Says You’re Dead? (2019), a book of medical and bioethical essays, published by Algonquin, one of the major literary presses. But most of his books have come out through small, indie, and university presses: Permanent Press, the University of South Carolina Press, and especially Black Lawrence Press, a literary house in upstate New York that has published five of Appel’s story collections to date, including his most recent, Amazing Things Are Happening Here (2019).

“I always wanted to be a writer,” says Appel. “But I didn’t really know what that meant. I knew it was the kind of job you could do in your bathrobe and slippers, and that seemed very appealing. It wasn’t until I got to law school, though, that I tried to think of something more productive that I could do with my life. I didn’t study much law in law school, but I did a lot of reading and writing—and that’s why I’m now a physician and writer.”

Appel did finish law school and went on to medical school, though he continued to turn his attention to his writing when he could. His subsequent career in medicine has allowed him a three-days-on, four-days-off flexibility that affords plenty of time for writing. “I tell students that if you’re meant to be a writer, then writing really has to be your first priority,” he says. “For most people, that priority is some combination of their job and their family life. It doesn’t mean that you have to sell your children in order to write, but it does mean that if running triathlons is more important to you than writing, you’ll never make it. So, with that said, my time when I’m not with my family or here at the hospital is spent writing.”

That includes time taken to ponder, dream, and come up with what in the film business is called the logline—that is, a single sentence that summarizes the entire script. “I spend a lot of time working on that logline,” says Appel, “so that when I finally sit down to write a story, I know how it’s going to proceed and end.” Mind you, that logline can take odd twists and turns; Appel relates one that imagines an alien sent to study the ways of earthlings but who winds up doing so in the setting of a Latvian restaurant located next to an abortion clinic. “It’s a very concrete set of facts that lets you know just about everything you need to know to get the story written,” he says.

It’s not the usual stuff of the story anthologies, which favor a grittier approach to the things of life, but Appel professes an allegiance to a certain offbeat magical realism that coheres with life on the ward. “I walk on the edge of realism,” he says. “And as a psychiatrist I hear the most amazing stories—but, like the old joke about the rabbi who plays his best game of golf ever on the highest of the high holy days, who am I gonna tell? I invent my own stories, and I think they’re believable—if you have a very broad definition of believability, anyway.”

Not surprisingly, Appel has several other books in the works. Some are destined for the major houses, others for the indies with which he’s been working over the years. “When my agent thinks one of my books is going to put her kid through college, she’ll take it to a big publisher,” he says. “The other ones, I’m free to take where I’d like.” He adds, “Your career has to be more than one project.” Jacob Appel has proven that again and again—and there’s plenty more to come.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.