Review: Knee-Jerk Magazine

A Review of Knee-Jerk Magazine 

by Juliana Kapetanov

Knee-Jerk Magazine started as a literary blog, but is now a full-fledged online literary magazine “sharing ideas, stories, laughter, and a whole lot of corndogs.” The primary genres of work published in Knee-Jerk are fiction, nonfiction, and arts/media. Presented in an almost blog-like format, this magazine publishes on a continual basis, inviting readers “to pull up a chair and contribute to the ongoing dialogue.” They feature works by both published and emerging writers, placing them side by side. As their website states: “Think of Knee-Jerk as a dinner table filled with friends and family.” Knee-Jerk creates a community that welcomes readers, writers, and artists to come together and have an enjoyable, thought-provoking experience.

In terms of design, Knee-Jerk’s website is very appealing. It has a bright, yellow and white, polka-dot background and a very eye-catching logo and header. The font choices are distinctive yet easy to read, especially when set against a light gray background. Vivid, interesting photographs of authors accompany each written piece. This adds to the uniqueness of the magazine in form and content. Overall, the site is easy to navigate, with a menu on top and a sidebar to easily select stories to read. The “Archive” tab on the top menu is very useful and the main place to visit when looking for previously published works, as the homepage only shows the current month’s pieces. 

The content found in Knee-Jerk varies greatly from month to month. In January 2013, they featured an imaginative flash fiction piece entitled “Nikola Tesla’s White Pigeon” by Kate LaDew, excerpts from Greg Fiering’s comic strip “Migraine Boy,” as well as a few other short fiction pieces and part of an inventive series by Adam Drent called “Bedtime Stories” in which Drent reads stories and records them as mp3s for his audience. Other times, Knee-Jerk will publish pieces of creative nonfiction, such as “Teenage Kicks, an Essay” by Damian Van Denburgh, which appeared in the magazine in September 2011. Overall, there is a wide variety of content that this magazine publishes. However, the most important characteristic of all of the pieces is originality. Each piece is highly original and creative. This is a publication for adventurous readers who never want to see the same thing twice.

Two of the characteristics which I found most intriguing in much of Knee-Jerk’s content were originality and distinctive voice. I read the short fiction piece entitled “Bodies, Fathers” by Sarah Sorenson. Something that stood out in this piece was the use of concise, clear language. The story is told from a young girl’s point of view, so the language is honest and descriptive. There is a minimalistic quality that makes this story easy to read, but its simplistic language also suggests deeper meaning and calls for a closer examination by the reader. The unnamed protagonist sees the world from an innocent child’s perspective and notices things that adults are accustomed to and may overlook, such as the “wooden paper plate holders” that she and her mom use while eating pizza, or the “sexy naked lady and silly naked man” that her uncle lets her watch on HBO. Simple things like this may not seem like much, but actually say a lot about how this child is being raised and how she perceives the world. Overall, this story offers a fresh, highly original take on what it means to be a kid. Sorenson’s writerly voice comes across as one of a kind in this piece. 

Another great piece of fiction in Knee-Jerk is Lindsay Hunter’s “Dishes.” I have read Hunter’s work before and have always admired the way her language and dialogue so effortlessly evoke authenticity. Hunter employs a really interesting technique in which she does not use quotation marks for dialogue nor does she set it apart from the exposition in her stories. The dialogue blends into the story, making for a quicker reading, but also adding a sense of verisimilitude to her work. For example, she writes: “Before I leave for work my kid hands me a brown bag and tells me he’s made my lunch. When I’m halfway down the driveway he yells after me Big girls gotta eat! and I guess I taught him that saying, it’s what I usually say when I’m eating in front of other people, because I am a big girl, that’s a fact, and it makes people feel better if it’s acknowledged.” In real life, just as her work, there are no spaces or indents for dialogue; there are no quotation marks that appear before and after we speak. This is one thing I love about her writing. Also, the word choice is always clever and creative. Hunter really has an ear for great dialogue and many of her pieces have a small town, southern feel. They are almost poetic in a sense because her stories are fun to read aloud. Her voice is extremely distinctive in that it incorporates small town dialect yet is still very accessible to a wide range of readers.

Originality in content is a major aspect of the high quality work in this Knee-Jerk Magazine. Both Sorenson’s “Bodies, Fathers” and Hunter’s “Dishes” are stories which, upon first glance, describe common, everyday events. However, (this is particularly important in reference to Hunter’s piece), these writers depict the world around us in a new and exciting light. Hunter’s piece is a portrait of an overweight, lower-class mother who works at a beauty parlor and stops at the grocery store on her way home from work. Sorenson’s piece chronicles the adventures of a young girl buying underwear, washing clothes, and eating pizza with her mother; watching wrestling and HBO at her grandparents’ house; and waiting to see her dad—who she doesn’t recognize—at the airport. These are all pretty mundane, unoriginal situations, yet it is the writers’ inherent originality in writing style and voice that makes these stories well worth reading. 

Knee-Jerk is truly unparalleled when it comes to literary publications online. The work they publish is fascinating, innovative, and often overlooked. This magazine fosters a literary and creative community for published and emerging writers and artists. Its content asks us open our eyes and reimagine our world. Whether it is in its highly imaginative, almost surreal pieces or those which so closely mirror the everyday, Knee-Jerk Magazine is an always-exciting, high quality publication that is worth checking out. 

Juliana Kapetanov is a writer and editor from Northwest Indiana. She attends Valparaiso University and studies English, Creative Writing, and Spanish. She is currently an assistant editor and copy editor for Valparaiso Fiction Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Lighter, Spirits, Editorial Cerebro, and Fiction Southeast.