Allan Appel dumped an entire career worth of books and magazines onto a desk in the Institute Library — and proceeded to take his audience through a decades-long, hodgepodge literary journey.
As an icy rain chilled pedestrians outside, writers, readers and friends gathered among the Institute’s bookshelves to sip wine and hear Appel share the details of his winding path from poetry to prose, with the use of several props. Appel, a longtime novelist and poet who is also a New Haven Independent reporter, was the main feature at a local “Writer’s Circle” series launch party hosted Wednesday night by the Arts Council of Greater New Haven in partnership with the library.
“What I decided to perform was my life as a writer,” he said, proceeding to pull out a set of false teeth and a recent royalty check and hand them to his wife Suzanne (pictured) in the first row. “To talk about myself as a specimen of writing.”
He never expected to be a writer, he said. “Why do this?” he often asked himself. He traced his journey in writing from an early foray into poetry after graduating from college in New York City to his current manuscript for an upcoming novel.
“It’s short. You’re in, you’re out, it’s good, it’s bad, you’re done,” he said of poetry.
Soon, he began to see his poems take narrative form. “I was trying to figure out if I was in the right genre,” he said.
The switch happened after, at a party in 1968, he met someone who paid him $1,000 to write an erotic novel over the course of four weeks, ultimately titled Members Rise.
Appel has written several novels and plays, often on religious practice and conversion. His next novel has the working title Love, Death and the Cheeseburger.
The Arts Council will host monthly Writer’s Circle panels and discussions beginning Nov. 20.
