Photograph by Dale Lindberg

Wayne Lindberg is the author of Cary Malone and Other Stories—part of the Nothing Moments collaborative project in art, literature and design—and the co-founder of Poetry.LA. He lives in Santa Monica, California, where he works as an instructional designer.

The Nothing Moments collection, of which your book Cary Malone and Other Stories is a part, consists of twenty-four limited edition books. Among the many writers who participated in this project are Aimee Bender, Ben Ehrenreich, Benjamin Weissman, and yourself. How did you get involved with the project? Explain the inspiration behind it, and the role your work plays.

The project is the latest in a series of collaborations dreamt up by Steven Hull, the painter and graphic artist, a man who seems cheerfully undaunted by coordinating dozens of work products and personalities. In this case, he invited a herd of writers to submit fiction pieces that were handed over to visual artists to illustrate. The results went to designers who laid out the books—24 glossy, perfect-bound little volumes. The 24 colorful stacks that covered the counter at the opening reception in Los Angeles was, in itself, a piece of conceptual art. My contribution was Cary Malone and Other Stories, containing pieces that range in length from flash to a few thousand words.

I was invited to participate because I’d had a story in Steven’s last collaboration, Ab Ovo, a children’s storybook intended to “push the edge of the form” as it were. The deal was this: 19 visual artists took the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory 2TM test used by courts to determine an individual’s mental outlook. Each test-generated personality profile went to a different author who used it as the jumping off point for a children’s story. The stories were then illustrated by 19 graphic artists (not the ones who took the test). The collaborators never met. The result was a limited edition art book, rolled out in 2006. The contents can be viewed here.

“She Had Eyes That Hypnotized” is the name of the story you wrote for Ab Ovo. What can you tell us about the personality profile that spawned this piece?

Here are some quotes from the profile I received: “Her pattern of adjustment predisposes her to psychological and interpersonal problems. She is angry, somewhat sullen, mistrustful, and generally self-indulgent … disregards authority figures … tends to deny problems and to blame others for her own shortcomings.” My first reaction was that it sounded like a stereotypical artistic temperament. Since I find unconsciously self-centered people deliciously entertaining (at a distance) I had the central character, little Princess Valeria, be as willful and indifferent to consequences as I could. Then, since the assignment was to “push the form” of the children’s story, I gave her, figuratively speaking, a loaded gun. But the main enjoyment came from working with the fairytale world view and language.

Your stories in Cary Malone lean toward the morbid, absurd, satirical. Why does your work take this tone?

Not everything I write fits that description, but much of it does. Your choice of “morbid” makes me smile. I first heard that word as a kid, in the context of some adult critiquing one of my stories. Ever since, it’s had a special place in my heart. I don’t sit down with the intention of writing in a certain tone. It’s a good question why so much of my fiction and playwriting has tended to the grotesque and nihilistic. Maybe it provides a psychological counterbalance to the relentlessly rational writing I’ve done for a living, including business journalism, technical writing, corporate training videos, and instructional design work.

Several of the stories in Cary Malone are the result of a workshop you took with Benjamin Weissman. How did he help focus your writing on the short form and the style you present in your book?

I turned to Benjamin’s workshop because I’d written a novel I couldn’t get published. I’d met Benjamin years ago at Beyond Baroque, a literary arts center. His workshop was an eye-opener. It was attended not only by writers, but by visual artists, film directors, and performing artists. We were encouraged to look for what worked in the pieces that were presented—the juice, the pay dirt—using our emotional reaction as a divining rod, zeroing in on specific phrases or images that evoked or challenged. Benjamin has nothing against plots—he just doesn’t like to “smell them.” I started paying more attention to individual moments and loosened my grip on the exposition steering wheel. The best advice I got from him was to try shorter pieces. It was liberating to be able to do 15 rewrites of a 250 word piece in the time it would have taken to write the first draft of a 3000 word story.

The story of how you entered the writing business is fascinating, and, if I may say, unconventional. I’ll say a few words. Army. Vietnam. Soft-core porn novels. You say the rest.

I wrote stories and plays as a kid because I found it entertaining. That led to my writing and directing plays in high school and college. But I was not much of a reader and had little sense of the “literary world.” Writing was just something I did. My first job out of school was as a general assignment reporter for a small daily paper in Connecticut. Around that time a college friend who was working for a New York literary agent turned me onto the then thriving soft-core porn novel market. I wrote books that were published under the pen name Brian North, working on them even as I was drafted into the Army and sent to Vietnam. I produced a kind of leering smut peopled by the godforsaken. Essentially I was getting paid to learn how to work in the long form.

After the Army, I wrote for a business news service (Fairchild Publications), first in Chicago and then at its Washington, D.C. bureau. In Washington, in the early 1970s, I met a lot of people involved in what was then called “The Movement”—the many counter-culture efforts involved in trying to end the war and foment revolution in many areas of American life. I used what I’d learned as a working journalist to oversee publication of the national house organ of the Peoples’ Party, a group now remembered, if at all, for running Dr. Spock for President. I found myself in Venice, California, about the time the war ended and the New Left collapsed. I winged it for awhile, doing various jobs including painting signs, reading Tarot cards and working in a food co-op.

Inevitably, I met artists, one of whom was a playwright named Glenn Hopkins. Together we wrote and mounted a play (“Dinosaur”) that got good reviews and was published in the 1980 edition of West Coast Plays. I wrote and produced three more plays in the early 1980s. Just as I was learning how financially impoverishing this kind of writing can be, I was approached by a young corporate video producer seeking writers who could translate technical information into scripts for employee training videos. Not a problem, I said. This gave me the breathing space to write four screenplays and some TV spec scripts. A couple of agents did what they could, but all was for naught. By the late 1990s I was back where I started, writing to entertain myself and a few friends. I wrote a novel in serialized installments. It was (is) called “Am I Dead Yet?” I followed that with the still unfinished “She Lusts to Kill.” I tried to find an agent or publisher for the first one. The best reaction I got was “I’m sorry, but it’s just too in your face.” It was also too ambitious—a mock epic featuring necrophilia that collapsed under its own weight. But, out of the wreckage, I found many parts I could turn into short fiction. Maybe two-thirds of the pieces in Cary Malone and Other Stories are based on material I mined from the two novels.

Will you ever return to playwriting?

I would if I could find a paying audience … and not a minute sooner.

Tell us about your slasher script “Snip.”

Two years ago, a friend pointed me to a horror film script contest on the Web, thinking it would be up my alley. The sponsoring production company said the four winning scripts would be produced on DVD. I wrote a script that was one of the winners. The production company then announced it was going out of business. Taking a second look at their website, I realized I had been dealing with a quite self-deluded one-man operation. I can relate to that. But, now I have one more un-produced screenplay. It is a 20-minute piece that kind of turns the slasher movie premise on its head. The killer is not some insane, one-dimensional guy, but a shy young woman who perpetrates mutilations of opportunity with a diabolical instrument of her own invention.

You are the co-founder and videographer for Poetry.LA Do you write poetry? What has been the most rewarding part of this project?

I don’t write poetry, but I worked for a time at Beyond Baroque, a literary center that workshops and presents a lot of poetry. I see poetry reading as an entertainment form that can expand its audience through good quality internet videos. The most rewarding thing to date is that the premise seems to be working. We have over a hundred performances posted and have had over 20,000 viewings of our various videos on YouTube. Not a huge amount by YouTube standards, but it’s given a lot more exposure to poets who normally perform to small live audiences in the cafes and other venues where we’ve taken our camera.

Beyond Baroque intrigues me. Is it a non-profit center? Do they focus primarily on poetry? What else should we know about it?

Beyond Baroque is a non-profit literary arts center started in a Venice storefront in the 1960s by George Drury Smith. In the 1970s it moved to the former Venice City Hall building where it currently resides. It has a reading/performance room, a book store emphasizing small press titles, and an extensive collection of small press books and journals dating back decades. It runs a regular reading series featuring both name and emerging writers from LA and around the country. The free Beyond Baroque Wednesday Night Poetry Workshop is a Los Angeles institution, operating since 1968. The center also holds workshops in various types of fiction, including screenwriting, and it houses a small art gallery. Though the performance room is mostly devoted to featured poetry and fiction readings and twice-monthly open readings, it occasionally hosts music and performing arts events. In fact I produced one of my plays there in the 1980s and, for a time, worked in the office.

Chicago, Washington D.C., Los Angeles. Have you always lived in a big city? What do you like about the metropolis?

I don’t think I ever made a conscious decision to live in urban areas. I was born in the Bronx and moved to the New Jersey suburbs when I was seven. I’ve lived in two semi-rural areas in Connecticut and Viet Nam. I’d be content to live with the birds if I had a good Internet connection and could make a living.

What do you collect, and why?

I’m not a collector unless we count everyday apartment clutter and unpublished manuscripts.