Michael Kardos
First off, Michael, tell us about your book.
I first started mucking around with what would become Fun City Heist back in 2020, during lockdown. As a reader, I was finding myself drawn to books that made me laugh. I tore through Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels, I revisited Nick Hornby’s novels…I wanted humor during a dark time, and I wanted to be reminded that people weren’t only self-interested and nihilistic.
I found myself putting aside the (rather humorless) manuscript I’d been working on and beginning a different kind of book about a disbanded rock group—oh, and you can’t imagine just how bad their breakup was!—that reunites for one last blowout gig at Fun City, the local beachfront amusement park, in order to rob it. Long before I was a writer, I was a drummer, and for a number of years my life revolved around music. Fun City Heist gave me the chance to write about some things that are embedded in my DNA: rock band life, beach town life, and crime (as a literary genre, not a personal pursuit).
Now, tell us about where you live and what you love about it.
See “beach town” above. But here’s a more complete answer: I grew up at the Jersey Shore
Where were you living when you were 7 years old? Are they fond memories?
A white colonial house in Monmouth County, NJ. Fond memories abound. Our neighborhood was teeming with kids, and we’d roam from house to house. This was about three miles from the beach; summers, we went there almost every day.
Many, and often, starting with the Guinness Book of World Records (1979 edition).
Do you have a favorite children’s book and what about it makes it so?
A rotating, long list. When I was a kid, my favorite was A Wrinkle in Time—
I suppose because it was so full of wonder, weirdness, and big ideas. As a parent reading to my own kids, my short- list includes The Wild Robot and the Dog Man books. Oh, and The Paper Bag Princess.
A common thread (I think): strangeness and humor and cleverness and a kind, but firm, push against traditional expectations and norms.
What are the funniest or most embarrassing stories your family tells about you?
There was the time, shortly after I got my driver’s license, when I was driving home at night and I tried to go around a sobriety check-point. I was fully sober but saw all those police lights and orange cones and assumed there’d been an accident. I thought I was doing everyone a favor by driving around it. The police thought differently.
How did you meet your beloved? How did your first date go?
We met the first day of our MFA program at Ohio State. We were great friends for a year before we started dating. Our first real date was on the outskirts of town at a Mexican restaurant where we felt pretty sure we wouldn’t run into anyone we knew. It went great! The salsa was excellent.
In my 20s, I was old. That was 30 years ago, and I’m much younger now. I also think I’m more patient, and as an artist I’m far more apt to believe that the satisfaction comes from the process, and not from whatever comes, or doesn’t come, after.
Is there a question no one has ever asked you that you wish they would? Something, perhaps, that people would be surprised to know about you?
Q: What is a little-known, unimportant skill you have?
A: I run errands quickly.
We all have or can point to a certain experience where, because of this experience, it shifted our lives in a way that led to where we are today, it could be a person you encountered or you were in a certain place or you had a certain experience or all three, but it was so pivotal that you can say that because of this experience, I am where I am today as a writer or in a greater sense as the person I am now.
Ohio State accepting me into their MFA program with a teaching assistantship—that meant everything and changed the course of my life. Before then I was in Jersey, feeling old at 28, still drumming but becoming more and more passionate about writing fiction…but I didn’t know any other writers. Suddenly, I’m in a new city, thrown into a program with people who were as obsessive about writing—and art more generally—as I was. It was a very special time that came along at the perfect moment. Also, did I mention my future wife was part of our small cohort of writers?
Can you remember a particular random act of kindness from a stranger?
Something I’ve been the recipient of, and have witnessed, and have, years later, watched my kids do: giving an arcade prize you’ve won to a younger kid. Nobody’s eyes light up like those of a young kid who’s just been handed a free arcade prize: a stuffed animal, a balsa wood glider, a mini-basketball, even a bunch of tickets that just spat out of the Skee-Ball machine.
Is there a song, person, or group that you listen to when you are feeling a bit down?
I just hang out with my wife. She makes me happy. Though it never hurts to put on Springsteen’s The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle.
Were there parts in your book that your editor cut that you hated to see go? If so, what were they?
Honestly, by the time my editor received the book it was pretty lean and mean. Oh, wait—there was something: the epigraph. The manuscript originally had the following epigraph: “And the beat goes on” – Sonny and Cher. But permissions for song lyrics, even very short ones, can get pricy and cause delays, so I was asked to cut it.
Here’s how I think about it now: this is a rock-&-roll novel! Readers are invited to choose a favorite lyric and scribble it onto the page themselves.
How do you feel about “Independent Bookstores” and their role in your success?
Independent bookstores mean everything! They serve as community hubs and centers of culture. They play matchmaker between writer and reader, which is to say they’re in the business of forging human connection. Not to mention, a single bookstore championing your book can change the course of that book’s success, and I owe the indies a lot.
And finally Mike,
IF
YOU COULD GO BACK IN TIME
to
any period from before recorded history to yesterday,
be
safe from harm, be rich, poor or in-between, if appropriate to your
choice,
actually experience
what it was like to live in that time, anywhere at all,
meet
anyone, if you desire, speak with them, listen to them, be with
them.
When
would you go?
Where
would you go?
Who
would you want to meet?
And
most importantly, why do you think you chose this time?
I doubt I’d want to stay there very long, but I wouldn’t complain if somebody dropped me into the Late Cretaceous period, someplace around what is now Montana. Big dinosaurs up close with the promise I wouldn’t become their snack? Sign me up, please.
But also:
Paris, January 14, 1932, seated in the Salle Pleyel.
Readers, order this great book at your local independent bookstore.
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