Kio Stark

Follow Me Down Promo

My first novel begins with an envelope. Twenty years old, maybe more, with the dust of the dead-letter office still clinging to the stained, fraying paper. It’s for someone else, but Lucy opens it anyway. Read an Excerpt from Follow Me Down Read Reviews, Preview the Limited Edition, and more! Preorder Follow Me Down Powell’s [...]

From Curator Journal this month, my conversation with Machine Project’s Mark Allen about museums, strangers interactions, and the art of interruption

The life of the street, at its best, is lyrical, unexpected, and momentarily intimate. Cities by definition comprise strangers, and when strangers find cause to break their urban detachment, the episodes of street intimacy they make can be precious and thrilling. These moments fascinate me, both in my own experience and in the abstract, as [...]

My first novel to be published June 2011

I’m so excited to announce that my first novel, Follow Me Down, will be published in June 2011 by Red Lemonade, an imprint of Richard Nash’s new publishing company, Cursor. You can see the cover here, and read an excerpt here.

Stranger Studies

I recently published a narrative version of my ITP Strangers class on the Atlantic Magazine blog. Here’s an excerpt. “This is a class on urban culture. My fundamental premise is that strangers and cities are inherently intertwined. The everyday nature of interacting with strangers is a byproduct of urbanization, which has created a culture of [...]

words and their failures

I am thinking now of the summer years ago when I taught expository writing to a group of 13-14 year olds, about twenty of them. We met every morning for three hours, much too long an interval for them. I broke up the time halfway through by playing a game of ping pong with each [...]

My Foo10 session–Secrets of human nature: 5 experiments you can do with strangers

Below are rough unedited notes from the session I did at Foo today. About me: -I make things out of words (stories, explanations), and really the main thing I’m always trying to do is show you something that was invisible to you before. I do this as a fiction writer (just finished first novel), that’s [...]

It’s pay what you can, not what you want

[Originally published June 15, 2010 at The Literary Platform] We are living in generous times. I don’t mean that in a hippie, random acts of kindness sort of way. I mean that we are living at a time when sharing as a model of exchange is increasingly common. Right now, our models of getting paid [...]

what you loved when you were nine or ten

There’s a beautiful passage early in the book The Conversations (a long rambling interview between film/sound editor Walter Murch and writer Michael Ondaatje), where Murch is talking about how intoxicating it was to play with sound when he was nine or ten. He got a cassette tape recorder when they were very new, and would [...]

What are you afraid of?

My ITP students went out on the street and asked (on video) about 40 people the question, “What are you afraid of?” It was remarkable how many of the respondents gave thoughtful, vulnerable answers. Most common: 1. Failure. Most of the people who said they were afraid of failure were young. Also, one older man [...]

Masked men, bare cocks, and sometimes a conversation

There are a thousand ways to make a binary split of the world’s population, and the one on my mind right now is this: there are the kind of people who pick up a ringing payphone, and the kind of people who don’t. I pick it up. I love those strange, slightly jarring, unexpected interactions [...]