Knee-Jerk

Before Knee-Jerk debuted last summer, and as we prepare to launch our first annual print issue in a few months, we found ourselves wrestling with a number of questions regarding the nature of literature, readership, and people’s attention spans. Frankly, we were a little worried. Do people still read? What do people read, or have time to read? Where, how, and why do people read? Are people still willing to pay for a little-known magazine filled with little-known writers when they have unlimited access to free literature online? If they are willing to pay, what compels them to do so? And why—why?!—start a new publication now, when it seems as though people generally have less time, less money, and less attention to devote to reading than ever before?

In other words: What is the future of literature?

In order to help us and our faithful readers sort through these and other bewildering questions, Knee-Jerk spoke with editors from three new(ish) publications: Matt Bell of The Collagist, a wide-ranging online lit journal hosted by Dzanc Books; Zach Dodson of FeatherProof Books, which recently launched its new TripleQuick iPhone app; and Rebekah Silverman and James Tadd Adcox of Artifice magazine, an exciting print journal that debuted this month.

You can check out all three forward-focused projects online, but in the meantime, continue reading to see what their editors have to say about surviving the digital age.

In Caleb’s absence I’d had to teach myself the simplest tasks: how to mow the lawn, how to clear the gutters, how to ignite a fire. By the time I had the fire roaring my hands were cracked and blackened. I carried clothing by the armful and tossed them singly onto the fire, watched each one burn before tossing on another. He’d forgotten or left behind a box filled with the clothing he wore for outdoor activities, hiking and fishing and similar, and I’d taken to wearing his clothing in place of my own.

The girl thought of all of the things she was supposed to be by now; all of the places she should’ve lived. She thought of the cold but truthful laboratory back in Idaho. Dividing the seed by hand with a blade. Counting out bits of fluff with tweezers. Oceanspray. Kinnikinnick. Each seed had its own smell; its own difficulty to it. The walnuts would rot, the embryo shriveled. The willow, propagated, would remain a stick and you would pull it from its foam and throw it onto a pile of plain-looking twigs beside you in a bucket.

I poured bleach down the drain until it gave me a headache, but the next night the ammonia came back, and I dreamed, again, of her husband. He was wearing his high school letter jacket with the football on the sleeve, and a beard that he never had. It was trimmed pencil-thin along his jaw line, and he wore rimless glasses like the author on the book jacket of a novel I was reading.

Onstage, the Power Team stacked wood, concrete, and blocks of ice. They smashed them apart, one-by-one, with their heads and fists. They mopped their sweaty brows and told us, promised us, that this was possible because Jesus made it so, because Jesus provided strength, because Jesus found purpose for every child of God.