Conversation Between Friends: Michael Kardos and Catherine Pierce
I owe Katie (the poet and essayist Catherine Pierce) five dollars. I have owed her five dollars since the autumn of 2000, when I inadvertently stiffed her the money after having a very inexpensive breakfast together. We were both first-year MFA students on a budget, yet at the café nearest to our apartments you could order eggs and toast for $3.95. Throw in a tip, and it’s five bucks. Apparently, Katie dropped a ten on the table, expecting me to pay her my portion. I would have, and to this day I don’t remember not paying, but I’m sure she’s right. I forgot. But if I did forget, I know why. I was distracted. By my new, fascinating friend, Katie.
All these many years later, years that have included marriage, two kids, some pets, and countless words written in each other’s orbit, she still won’t let me pay her the five dollars back. Believe me, I’ve tried. But she prefers I stay forever in her debt.
—Michael Kardos
Michael Kardos: So, Katie—for twenty years you establish yourself as a poet, and then you go and write a memoir (Foxes for Everybody). I got to watch from the sidelines as you consciously taught yourself the creative nonfiction genre. Care to talk about that?
Catherine Pierce: I’ve always loved essays—and I’ve always loved work that blurs the edges of genre. I think the idea of genre-blurring was what let me feel like I could try my hand at an essay or two. The first essay I wrote was very short—I’d recently heard the fantastic Beth Ann Fennelly read from her book Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs, and was struck by how powerful those very, very concise prose pieces could be—and I loved the challenge of blending the muscularity of a poem with the narrative possibility of prose.
After a few months of playing casually with the form, I decided to get serious. I made a reading syllabus for myself and spent a summer immersed in the work of contemporary essayists. It was a blast—I hadn’t done that particular kind of intentional deep dive since grad school, and it was a thrill to be working on something totally new, to be teaching myself a new way of constructing a piece of writing, considering structure and voice in new ways, weighing what it meant to write something true without the comforting gauzy cloak of poetry’s “the speaker.”
Mike, for you that dance between genres has always seemed organic—you’ve moved back and forth between the short story and the novel for as long as I’ve known you. Your first short story collection—your first book, One Last Good Time—was published in 2010. Over the next fifteen years, you published four novels (The Three Day Affair, Before He Finds Her, Bluff, and Fun City Heist), and then this past spring published another short story collection, Quick Change. But it’s not like you’d stopped writing short stories while you were working on your novels. Can you talk a bit about that balance between short and long form fiction for you? How do you decide what to work on when, and what does working on those different forms do for—or to—your brain?
MK: When we were in grad school, I read, and wrote, a lot of short stories, because the creative writing workshop tends to be a better format for stories than novels. That ended up being a real benefit, because it gave me the opportunity to read, and try, lots of different forms, voices, perspectives, levels of realism…I sort of consciously tried to avoid “finding my voice,” which to me always seemed limiting; I felt, and still do, that one’s voice is best thought of as a byproduct rather than a goal. Once I started publishing novels, I wrote fewer stories simply because novels take a really long time; I’d wait until I had an idea that felt absolutely right for a story. But I love short stories—reading them and writing them—and because they’re short, they continue to be an opportunity to experiment: maybe it’s a wild premise or perspective, or a level of absurdity, that I wouldn’t want to sustain for a whole novel; maybe it’s an unusual structure, or maybe it’s simply a traditionally told story that seemed best told in a compressed form.
I’m curious whether living with a fiction writer for a bunch of years has affected your poetry at all?
CP: I’m not sure that living with a fiction writer has affected my poetry. I think that living with a writer, and specifically with you, has absolutely affected my poetry, in the sense that you get the whole thing. You know about the necessity of creative time and brainspace, you help me find and protect those things, and you model creative commitment through your own writing. I also think there’s something nice about the fact that we’re both writers but work in different genres. We read each others’ writing, but we’re very much doing our own thing. It’s a good balance of camaraderie and space.
But what do you think? Has living with a poet affected your fiction at all?
MK: Are you kidding? Two of my novels (Bluff and The Three-Day Affair) end with a sentence in iambic pentameter!
Okay, one more answer: I think that fiction writers, especially novelists, can get hung up on word counts, like a block of time spent writing isn’t productive if you don’t generate 500 or 1,000 words or whatever. But a poem, because of its length, doesn’t, can’t, work that way. So I think seeing the way you go about writing poems has made me more comfortable about other ways that a writing session can feel productive, beyond the low-hanging metric of word count.
CP: You and I have talked about this before—how lucky we are to be married to a fellow writer, because that person innately understands the time and brainspace that writing takes, how it feels not to have that time, how it feels to have that time and not be able to hook into anything, and—crucially—how sometimes writing is staring out the window or taking a walk or a shower or playing a game of online chess. So we’re lucky, I think, that we both get it, and we both try to make sure the other person has that writing/thinking time whenever we can. But that doesn’t mean that time is easy to come by, or achieved without feeling guilt about all of the other things that aren’t getting done (speaking of, the dishwasher needs to be unloaded and one of our kids is still watching TV).
MK: Which brings up the super-dumb concept known as “work/life balance.” Can we talk about that? Because there isn’t any, right? Not when you have work and children and aging parents and prefer to be a human in the world rather than a hermit. It’s all just a big jumble, and there’s not enough time for anything, and we’re always a little guilty because of all the things we aren’t doing and the people we’re disappointing. Is that about right? And this feels connected to the other super-dumb thing expressed by Very Successful Writers (older men almost exclusively, mostly writing in the twentieth century), who implied that you aren’t a Real Writer unless you write every day for such-and-such amount of time, etc. But a lot of those writers were men whose wives took care of everything else in their lives. Some also had housekeepers and probably about six nannies. So, you know, easy for them to say. They probably thought raising kids was a snap, too, since their version of it was to pat the kid on the head at bedtime. Is any of this tracking?
CP: For sure. And one of the things I’m most grateful for in our hectic life together is that it’s our hectic life together—that we’re both trying to find time to do all of the things, and trying, too, to help the other person find that time, even as we recognize the impossibility of ever truly finding whatever the balance is.
You and I have lived together for twenty-three years(!) and have seen our own and each other’s writing processes evolve over time as our lives and our genres have shifted. What has changed for you in terms of process, and what has stayed the same, as we’ve gone from young(ish) grad students to professors to parents? And what do you find is different or similar about your process depending on which genre you’re writing in?
MK: I don’t think my process has changed radically over the years: my ideal is a few uninterrupted hours in a coffee shop—ideally a bad one, because it’s less crowded. White noise through the ear buds. No music. My first readers are the same from twenty years ago: you, and a couple of other grad school friends.
Another thing that hasn’t changed: As long as you and I have been writing, it’s supposedly been the worst possible time in the history of publishing. It’s never, to my knowledge, not been the single worst moment in publishing’s history. So I’ve learned to tune that out. It takes some of the pressure off and lets me just focus on writing the thing as best as I can.
What about you? Has your process or approach changed over the years?
CP: Well, as you know, I’ve never been able to write in coffeeshops (though I still try once every couple of years—it never works). I need total, uninterrupted quiet, which was a lot easier to come by when it was just you and me living in a little grad student house than it is now, when it’s you and me and our kids and our dog (also it feels important to note that you and both of our sons play the drums…). So I’ve had to get more intentional about my writing time—sometimes I’ll get up before everyone else and write for a bit, or I’ll find a time when everyone else is out of the house, or I’ll just shut the door and hope that that signal is effective enough (it’s usually not). But if I’m being totally honest, having to be more structured about my writing time has mainly been a good thing for my work—and my brain. I’ve never done well with giant swaths of unstructured time (before we had kids I used to teach every summer, partly for the extra money but also partly because I knew my brain needed that structure). So yes—the practicalities of my process have changed, necessarily, over the years, but what I need in order to write—quiet, time, focus, and brainspace—has stayed consistent.
MK: Connected to “brainspace”—I feel like a discussion about writing and craft, in 2026, would be deficient without a comment about AI. Here’s my stance: Good lord, don’t use it for anything in the writing process. Like, not one single part. Ever. I wrote up a thing to give my students that expands on this notion, and explains why. We have enough discussions about this (and with our kids) that I know you feel similarly. Any thoughts about where all this is headed? Is it something to worry about? Is there any bright side?
CP: You and I are very aligned on this—no AI for writing, ever. Not for brainstorming, not for feedback on drafts, not for fixing one sentence. Writing is supposed to be hard—that’s the joy of it, the figuring-things-out part—and I worry that the ubiquity of AI is making all of us less and less comfortable with that crucial element of artistic creation. I worry about it a lot, particularly with regard to young people who are growing up with AI constantly available, and even encouraged, in all parts of their lives. Those parts of the writing process—for a poem, a story, an essay, a paper for school—where you’re just sitting and writing things down and crossing them out and staring out the window and crossing more things out and getting frustrated and thinking “This will never happen,” and then it does happen, eventually, one way or another, or maybe sometimes that particular thing doesn’t happen but you keep writing stuff down and crossing it out and then eventually another thing happens—those moments help us to be human, to be creative, to understand that we can figure things out, and to recognize that struggling doesn’t mean that we’re doing something wrong—it often means that we’re doing something right.
So…yeah. I have a lot of thoughts. Is there any bright side? I’m sure there probably is. I don’t want to presume that I understand all of AI’s uses, and I know it can be particularly helpful in different fields. In our field, though, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with any benefits that outweigh its destructive risks.
MK: I think we should end on a positive note. What’s one positive thing about writing creatively in 2026 and beyond?
CP: I have two answers to that. First, writing creatively in 2026 is interesting and hard and joyous and maddening and fun and deeply satisfying, just like it was in 2016, and 2006, and, I assume, in 1926 and 1826 and 1726, etc. Second, making any kind of human art—writing, painting, acting, singing, dancing, collaging, playing the zither—is the absolute opposite of AI, and doing that work right now feels especially vital and especially meaningful.
MK: Agreed. And, oh, look—I just found five dollars. Here you go.
CP: No.
MICHAEL KARDOS is the Pushcart Prize-winning author of four novels and two story collections, most recently Fun City Heist (Severn House, 2025) and Quick Change (Press 53, 2025). Originally from the Jersey Shore, he co-directed—with Catherine Pierce—the creative writing program at Mississippi State University for over a dozen years before moving with his family to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He is on the low residency MFA faculty at the University of Nevada-Reno/Tahoe. Find him in Instagram @michael.kardos.
CATHERINE PIERCE is the author of five books of poems, most recently Dear Beast (Saturnalia, 2026), as well as of the memoir-in-essays Foxes for Everybody: Twenty-Four Hours of Early Motherhood (Northwestern University Press, 2026). A recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Academy of American Poets, she served as Poet Laureate of Mississippi from 2021 to 2025. She now lives with her family in her home state of Delaware, where she teaches online workshops and offers manuscript consultations through Studio & Craft, an online poetry community she founded in 2025. Find her on Instagram @catherinepiercepoet.
