You've probably never heard of Davis Schneiderman, and that's fine with him. As he says during this podcast, "it all ends in anonymity and obsolescence, and we have to come to terms with that."

His forthcoming story collection There's No Appropriate Emoji (MadHat Press) came out in May 2022, and can be ordered here. Throughout this podcast, he offers a number of important insights about the life of a contemporary writer (such as that if you engage in too many different types of things "people don't know what to do with you" which makes it harder to sell your work). He is "against earnestness and nostalgia" and isn't writing in order to get laid. ("It's words on a page -- it's not me.")

There's a bracing quality to his point of view, and it's also reassuring -- if you can convince yourself to let go of the romantic fantasy of the "successful writer." Comparing the thriving indie press scene to a radio dial, he says, "I'm glad those other channels exist on the lower end of the dial because those are the channels I really like to listen to." Schneiderman invites us to write for the pleasure of writing, and in collaboration with other likeminded artists, because the work in the moment is really all we can aspire to.

Schneiderman is a multimedia artist and writer and the author and editor of eight books, including the novels Drain (TriQuarterly/Northwestern), Abecedarium (Chiasmus), BLANK: A Novel, [SIC], and INK. (Jaded Ibis); the co-edited collections Retaking the Universe: Williams S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto) and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (Nebraska); as well as the audiocollage Memorials to Future Catastrophes (Jaded Ibis). His creative work has appeared in numerous publications including Fiction International, The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, and Exquisite Corpse. He is Associate Dean of Faculty at Lake Forest College.

Digressing with Robert Vaughan

But I Digress: How Writers Make it WorkBy Michael HickinsJun 21, 2022