Product Description

Discover the unexpected pleasures and exciting possibilities of talking to people you don’t know—how these beautiful interruptions can change you, and the world we share.

When Strangers Meet argues for the pleasures and transformative possibilities of talking to people you don’t know. Our lives are increasingly insular. We are in a hurry, our heads are down, minds elsewhere, we hear only the voices we already recognize and rarely take the effort to experience something or someone new. Talking to strangers pulls you into experiences of shared humanity and creates genuine emotional connections. It opens your world. Passing interactions cement your relationship to the places you live and work and play, they’re beautiful interruptions in the steady routines of our lives. In luminous prose, Stark shows how talking to strangers wakes you up.

Threaded throughout are powerful vignettes from Stark’s own lifelong practice of talking to strangers and documenting brief encounters, along with a deep exploration of the dynamics of where, how, and why strangers come together. Ultimately, When Strangers Meet explores the rich emotional and political meanings that are conjured up in even the briefest conversations and unexpected connections with strangers. Stark renders visible the hidden processes by which we decide who to greet and trust in passing, and the unwritten rules by which these encounters operate. When Strangers Meet teaches readers how to start talking to strangers and includes adventurous challenges for those who dare.

About the Author

Kio Stark is the author of the novel Follow Me Down, the independent learning handbook Don’t Go Back to School, and When Strangers Meet. She writes, teaches, and speaks around the world about stranger interactions, independent learning, and relational technology.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

When Strangers Meet

1


Who Is a Stranger?

How do you divide the world into known and unknown? Stranger is a slippery word—you think you know what it means until you try to account for yourself. It names an idea that invisibly structures your everyday life, what you see, the choices you make, the way you move. Are you ready to see just how slippery it is? Tell me what you mean when you say stranger.

I ask this a lot, and almost everything I hear boils down to this wonderfully contradictory list.

• Someone you’ve only seen once.

• The entire world of people you’ve never met or encountered.

• All the people who are unknown to you but possibly knowable, the people who you’re aware of as individuals in some way, but have never met or encountered in person.

• People you have personal information about but have not met, like a friend of a friend, or a public person.

• A person who doesn’t share your context, whether that is ideological or geographical.

• A person you don’t have anything in common with.

• Someone who is not part of any group you define yourself as belonging to.

• Someone you can’t understand.

• Someone who is a threat.

• Someone you encounter frequently but don’t know anything about other than what you can observe.

• Someone whose name you don’t know.

When we examine our ideas about strangers, the notion that a stranger is someone to be afraid of often falls away, chalked up to childhood training in “stranger danger” or something gleaned from the media, in contradiction to our lived experiences. Who we think is a stranger is an individual thing. It’s also defined by culture and history. The ways we interact with strangers—and so our very ideas of whom they are—can change in response to major events. During major disruptions in our lives, in storms, floods, outages, transit strikes, we suspend our usual expectations and put feelings of community above fear. Ever more frequent terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists around the world have directly increased suspicion of strangers—and have fueled illogical and unwarranted assumptio