This week brings us a triumvirate of editors, the men of Knee Jerk Magazine, C. James Bye, Jonathan Fullmer, and Stephen Tartaglione, who talk to us about Chicago, the jerking of the knee, and the remarkable access heroin addicts have to computers.

1. When I was a kid and I went to the doctor, he would hit my knee with a little triangle hammer and my knee would jerk involuntarily. Does that experience have anything to do with the name of your magazine?

Stephen: Maybe the act of hitting people in the knee, sure. I think that’s the ultimate goal, to get people’s attention using any means necessary. We’re not really afraid to flex some muscle if it builds readership.

Casey might be able to explain the whole reactionary aspect of it. He’s drawn diagrams.

Jonathan: No—your doc was actually performing an archaic form of communicating with animals. Your knee jerked because you are probably not an animal.

C. James: I have absolutely no idea what Jon is talking about. But I’d assume he’s right. He’s always right. Except when he’s wrong. Which is often.

2. Who are the editors of Knee Jerk? You can answer literally or figuratively or both?

Jonathan: Figuratively speaking, their names are Steve, Casey, and Jon.

C. James: Literally, a giant collection of space-kittens older than time itself traveling from galaxy to galaxy searching for love. Theirs is a tragic tale.

Stephen: Literally, Jon, Casey, and Steve. Figuratively, a pair of worn sweatpants.

3. How does your editorial staff divide your responsibilities?

Jonathan: Somewhat chaotically at the moment. We all come up with ideas and just sort of share the load according to who needs more to do at the time. Somehow it works.

Stephen: We divide them over beers and hamburgers. Most times we sit down with a piece of scratch paper and say, Okay, what do we need to finish up this month? What about next month? It’s a bit scattershot right now, but we’re working on streamlining the whole process. I just said streamlining. Other than that, Casey is in charge of dancing. Jon’s in charge of beat-boxing. I’m in charge of snacks.

C. James: All three of us are control freaks and perfectionists to one degree or another. So I think we all like to have our say at every level of pulling together an issue. And once I have my say, Jon and Steve gang up on me and subject me to swirlies, sometimes Indian burns, until I agree to do what they want. Then I go do their laundry and cry while they finish up the meeting.

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Kuzhali Manickavel offers us You Can’t and You Don’t in the August issue. We talk about whorish words, what interviewers usually ask, and cursed mango trees.

1. How does your cultural identity influence your writing?

I really don’t know. I understand that cultural identity is probably a big thing and one should probably be aware of it and what it does to your work, but it’s not something I really think about. Also I don’t really understand what “cultural identity” means.

This is not a good answer. I’m really good at answering questions like “What’s life like in India?” People usually ask me that.

2. The title of your story implies a certain kind of story and then we read something rather unexpected. Why is your story entitled You Can’t and You Don’t?

I liked the way it sounded. This is also not a good answer but I really just liked how it sounded very much.

3. A lot of who the protaqgonist is, is defined by who he was or who he is not. Was this a deliberate choice or something that arose from the writing of the story?

It was deliberate. I noticed in some conversations people were defining others using bits of information which were partial truths or incomplete memories and it just piled up, everybody contributing something, and in the end you got this portrait which satisfied everyone in some way but it wasn’t necessarily true. I was trying to do that.

4. You have one short story collection under your belt. Are you working on a new book-length work?

No.

5. What is “his” name?

I would tell you but it’s really racist and racism is bad.

6.  We can gather from the context, but what does “chee” mean?

I’ve heard it used for almost everything, from expressing profound disgust to extreme happiness mixed with surprise. “Chee” is very whore-ish that way.

7. What inspired this story?

I think it was inspired by some photographs I was looking at of people I don’t really know. Everyone was pink, which is strange to see in people you remembered as being predominantly brown, although someone once told me that air conditioning will turn brown people pink “like Bangalore tomatoes” which are actually red and not pink at all. Everyone was fatter also and there were babies or evidences of babies but fatness and babies are signs of wealth and prosperity in my country so maybe that’s a good thing. Anyway.

8. I read that you share your living space with a cursed mango tree. How’s the tree doing these days?

The Cursed Mango Tree is so very much the fine with all the so much foliages and squirrels are also coming and going and coming and going among the rapey monkeys doing all the mischiefs and porkiism and goondaism and dacoityism and it is all so very much the fine. Thanks for asking. Did you know that the actual monkey from whence the infamous “Monkey’s Paw” was pinched hangs out at The Cursed Mango Tree? And that he was also the original model used for the Chilled Monkey Brain dish that was served in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom? I bet you didn’t know that.

Steven McDermott, editor of Storyglossia, is also a writer and curator of detail. In the August issue, Steven brought us another of my favorite stories (there is a pattern here), Silver. Today we talk to him about the story, the good in bad mothers and how he takes his coffee.

When I first read this story, I thought it was heartbreaking and ugly and beautiful. Was it your intention to elicit that sort of reaction?

Oh, yes, I’m glad you had that reaction. I also remember when you accepted the story you said it was full of hurt and that made me happy, that the submerged layer of pain worked to the surface. Shaping an emotional and aesthetic response is unpredictable because readers bring their own stuff to the reading, but your response is in pitch with what I hoped for. Pleasure and pain, ugly and beautiful, ecstasy and heartbreak. To be conflicted is to be human.

2. Is your protagonist a bad mother? I ask because while she makes questionable choices I sensed a certain sympathy toward her in your writing.

Not a bad mother, no. She takes her children to her sister’s; she could have left them in the car while she was at the beach. I wanted that action to reveal compulsion; a moment of escape she had to act on even while tethered. And, yes, sympathetic for sure. I tried to be on her side. I wrote a bunch of other scenes and fragments from her POV that I cut or never added to various drafts, and that helped me imagine it her way. I will probably write another, longer, story featuring this character. So many possibilities now that I’ve done the initial character creation. I’m curious what she’d be like on the other side and will try to get her there in another story.

3. The sex scene between these two strangers is quite explicit. Do you ever worry about including explicit elements in your writing? Do those scenes come easily or are they more challenging to write than more sedate prose?

I don’t worry about including such explicit scenes although I do accept that it narrows the possibilities for publication. I don’t always leave such scenes in, depends on whether they serve the story. Sometimes a less explicit description or a metaphorical approach works better. In this case I don’t think the story works without the explicit description. I’d say such scenes are easy for me to write because they are fun to write. Harder to decide how much to leave in a story, but the writing part is easy. Free writing sex scenes is also a good warm-up exercise.

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