Kio Stark

About Me

My first novel, Follow Me Down, will be out in 2011. It emerged from my blog of vignettes about my interactions with strangers. I also teach geeks about ideas at NYU's Interactive Telecommuncations Program, where my courses include "Stranger Interaction Design" and "Mediated Intimacy."

I'm obsessed with "Very Short Writing" for the internet and how people are finding ways to make it exquisitely artful. Inspired by fragmentary books like Madeline Is Sleeping or miscellaneous Lydia Davis, but also thinking through the native constraints of the luminiferous ether, how we're losing certain things when we shift from books to pixels, and what it is we're gaining. Thinking about the shift from oral to written, thinking about this transition we're in and the current coexistence of forms through that analogy.

Why do you write?

Fuel:
Keeping my eyes vigilantly open; collaborating with other people; microobservations; swallowing vast archives full of information; falling down rabbit holes; locomotion.

Why:
Impossible question, cannot but reveal deep and profound self-absorption. But. Because it's what drags me out of bed some mornings, because it paralyzes me there other mornings. Because it's a little magic, in the conjuring sense, because I get glimpses of my own unconscious. Because there are two drug-like pleasures: when you write a perfect sentence, and when you are loved for what you have written.

Any favorite authors? Books?

Another sort of impossible question, but. Jose Saramago, Murakami, Graham Greene, Henry James, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick (but not for the prose), Calvino, selected Martin Amis, James Agee, Cheever, Frank O'Hara, that's today, tomorrow the list would be different. In general: a sense of unreality, stories that end badly.