Here’s an excerpt from “I’ve Never Been Me,” Tom Williams and Ben Whisman’s interview with Davis Schneiderman, which appears in the Spring 2014 print edition of Rain Taxi: Review of Books:

My life is a series of increasingly unexplainable attempts to discover something by not discovering, by surrendering traditional notions of what it means to be a writer or academic or intellectual or anything, really. The only thing I grow more sure of as I grow older is the fact that my interests and passions are fickle and temporary, and this stems to a certain extent from the figure of my father, an eight-year terminal brain cancer survivor, who reminds me each day in his completely changed and degraded state that the person I “am” is temporary. There is no me. I always suspected this from my work on the aleatory methods of William S. Burroughs’ cut-ups and other long-ago avant-garde movements, but I feel this more keenly than ever before.

Therefore, I have trouble slowing down and not working. Trouble sleeping. Trouble relaxing. I have unquiet dreams.

[….]

I’ve never been me, really.

There is no Davis Schneiderman.

Read the rest of the interview HERE.