Return of the Garbageman is an evening with Atlanta writers, filmmakers and musicians where they gather to read their supershort stories. It’s a mashup of fiction, memoir, DIY reportage and storytelling started by Bill Taft and Chad Radford. Here, Dry Ink talks with Mr. Radford about how it was created and where he sees it going.

Editor’s note: Dry Ink will begin publishing collections from Return of the Garbageman beginning next month.

Tom Cheshire: In your own words, describe Return of the Garbageman.

Chad Radford: I could give you a bunch of adjectives, like “quirky,” “irreverent” and “dangerous,” but you want more than that. It’s like an open mic forum where people can read things they’ve written, show off some found photographs or other things that tell a story. Brevity is the important part; take as much away as you can without harming the story. The rule of thumb: read whatever you’d like, just as long as it isn’t longer than one page. The point is to prompt people to craft short, sharp, shotgun blasts of punk rock fiction that require the reader, to do all of the work. Bring to it what you will and make of it what you will. It’s like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. All of the carnage happens off-screen. The real gore is a construct of the mind that is being prompted by what’s on the screen which is a far more gruesome and intriguing way of handling it.

TC: How did the idea of the Garbageman night come about?

CR: It’s named after a band that Bill had in the ’80s, called an Evening with the Garbageman, which he took from a record he had, called “An Evening with Mel Tormé.” Bill Hatched the idea. I followed through with it and we have both ran with it. He’s the rapper, I’m the DJ.

TC: Where do you see it going? Where would you like to take it?

CR: I’d like to see us all make a lot of money off of this. I want to see McSweeny’s, Soft Skull Press, Harper Collins and the others fighting over who gets to publish Supershort anthologies. I want “The Sad Snowman” to become a weekly syndicated column in the Oxford American, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. I want Bob Dylan to sing our praises on fucking XM Radio. I want to see Nancy Grace so full of rage over our stories that she gets wasted and stumbles into a Waffle Houses at 3 a.m. in Lilburn and starts a fight with the wait staff. Lou Dobbs blames it on illegal aliens. Bono books U2 to headline a human rights festival in Darfur and dedicates the entire concert to us for “putting a foot up the arse of rock and roll fiction,” and then compares us to Joyce, Faulkner, Orwell, Leonard Cohen, The Cohen Brothers, Dostoyevsky, Pynchon and Camus. We’re asked to write the definitive Supershort liner notes for the double CD reissues of Prince’s “Purple Rain,” but have to turn it down because the money isn’t good enough and the song “Darling Nikki” is removed because it goes against everything that Supershort is all about. In the year 2012 a statue of Tom Cheshire is erected in L5P and the Atlanta airport becomes known as Hartsfield-Jackson-Taft-Radford. Religious groups protest our readings and say that Supershort is mentioned specifically in Revelations as a sign that it is the end of days. Vincent Gallo submits Supershort stories for the zine but we turn him down because he just doesn’t get the kind of art that we’re doing. That’s where I would like to see it all go from here.