The most conceited thing about Michael Kardos’ website and the man in general, it seems, is how large his portrait on his website becomes when clicked upon. It fills the Internet browser with his headshot as it slowly loads. Other than that, nothing about Kardos, whether teaching in class or reading from his works, would suggest a smugness over his accolades: a review of his first novel “The Three Day Affair” (about three college friends who commit an accidental kidnapping and are tossed into a moral pressure cooker) in the Sunday New York Times is just a drop in the bucket.
His 2011 short story collection “One Last Good Time” beat out “Salvage the Bones” (winner of the National Book Award for Fiction) for the 2012 Mississippi Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction. That aforementioned smugness would seem justified.
But before all this writing and award-winning business, Michael Kardos said he had other things on his plate: earning a music degree from Princeton and playing as a professional drummer for eight years.
“I was in a band; we played in New York, and all around for a while,” Kardos said.
Kardos said he spent those years reading, writing and picking apart his favorite works before deciding to return to school with the intention of getting his master’s in fine arts in creative writing but not without a little fun first.
“Once I knew I was going, I spent the last year playing drums in a Bruce Springsteen tribute band. It would not have been awesome if that was going to be the rest of my life, but I knew it was a year, so it was great,” he said.
Kardos said graduate school became a place to learn to write, find a future wife and decide to purse a doctorate to become a university creative writing and literature professor.
“I assumed I’d spend three years obsessing and learning how to write and go back to New Jersey. I never knew I was going to teach until the middle of grad school at Ohio State. I met my wife there; we went to grad school at the University of Missouri together. We were studying for comprehensive exams on our honeymoon, on the beach reading these giant tomes,” he said, laughing.
At a reading from “The Three Day Affair” on Sept. 18, Becky Hagenston, also a creative writing professor with published short story collections, introduced Kardos kindly. In a later interview, she said she greatly admired the contrasts in “The Three Day Affair” and Kardos’ work at large.
“What I love most about Mike’s work – in his novel and his stories – is how he combines the darker elements of human experience with things that are just flat-out hilarious,” she said.
At the event, Kardos said he would be reading a flashback sequence detailing the main character meeting his future partners-in-crime at Princeton, and signing afterwards.
“I thought I would read for around 30 minutes. Afterward I’ll be around, we’ll chat informally, whatever you all want to do,” he said.
Post-reading, Kardos was indeed hanging around. And in line to cheese for the camera and get her copy of “The Three Day Affair” signed was English graduate student Rachel Mordecki, who said she took Kardos’ intermediate fiction class as a junior at MSU after transferring from the Mississippi University for Women.
“When I was at the ‘W’ my creative writing professor told me that I wasn’t a good enough writer to be a professional writer. Intermediate fiction was a last ditch effort; being in that class lifted my spirits about the whole thing,” she said.
One of the stories Mordecki wrote for the class impressed Kardos, and she said his constructive and easy-going nature helped her decide to continue to pursue creative writing.
“I wasn’t afraid to talk to him. It’s easy to go and talk to him in his office about an issue; he’s really good about just listening,” she said.
Just as Mordecki told, an interview with Kardos in his office was fluid and relaxed. And just as his portrait and his ways at the reading promised, the professional musician, award-winning, critically revered author and influential professor was nothing but sincere and grateful.