Your guide to… Benji Knewman #5, by editor Agnese Kleina

Based in Riga, Benji Knewman is the magazine that’s interested in everyday people with great stories to tell, and each issue is filled with honest interviews, personal essays, intimate photography and more. We asked editor Agnese Kleina to provide us with her own definitive guide to the new issue, a truly beautiful piece of publishing complete with splash-paint edges and Zeitmagazin editor Christoph Amend sketched on the cover.

1. Meet the girl who likes people who write in notebooks

Līga Požarska writes a delightful, passionate first-person story of her encounter with her favourite notebook (which belonged to a filmmaker). “This is one of the stories sent to us by our readers,” says Agnese. “As is common in this digital age, she sent her story via email so I don’t even know what she looks like :)”

2. Benji Knewman interviews Christoph Amend

“What we aim for at Benji Knewman is the human behind the professional/the name. The story with Christoph started one Friday night on Facebook when he messaged me saying that he had stumbled upon Benji Knewman in Amsterdam at Athenaeum Nieuwscentrum, and that our bookazine makes him want to come to Riga and see it for himself.

That he did, and while in Riga, he discussed his feelings while visiting a city that was actually founded by his countryman (a German priest back in the 13th century), his humble journalistic beginnings as a DJ at his school radio and why his school principal didn’t particularly like his style of journalism, and why some people nowadays call him the key keeper.”

3. ‘Mapping the Territory’: a beautiful, intimate photo series and feature that celebrates body marks as a way of telling personal life stories

“Yeah, this is particularly personal. Benji Knewman’s art director Madara and I took part in the photo series as well, with our own body marks and stories behind them. Our aim for this story is to let the reader simply be who she or he is and feel at ease with the body that they have, no matter the stretch marks, scars and other ‘imperfections’. So, we set an example by getting naked ourselves…”

4. A really engaging interview with an unlikely subject — marketing professor John Branch

“John was my marketing professor at the Stockholm School of Economics in Riga, so it was only a matter of time before he— a person so in love with Volkswagen and who has never owned a mobile phone! — would appear in Benji Knewman. Fun fact: for the exam in his class we had to write a marketing plan for a new product. It was the summer of 2013, when we were working on launching Benji Knewman, and so my marketing plan was about this new bilingual bookazine :)”

5. Arnis Tomass, the well-mannered motorcyclist

“When a friend told me about Arnis, who at his wise age of 65 still rides a motorbike and even participates in international competitions, I knew I had to get him in Benji Knewman. Arnis is one of those everyday heroes. Everybody has one or two — be it their neighbour, grandfather or the old guy at the local grocery store. They have loads of stories but almost no one to hear them out. They have opinions about everything, they like to swear and they are very real because they have no reason to pretend to be better than they already are.”

6. The ‘Jackpot’ of the issue — watercolours of a family home as it undergoes renovations through the ages

“This story is our jackpot of this issue. We wanted a comic and asked Latvian illustrator Anna Vaivare to draw one. The theme was up to her, as long as it’s ‘life that you can read’ (the magazine’s byline). And then, she proposed to tell the story of her family home. When we received the comic we were thrilled! All those little rooms and staircases in her story made me think of a doll’s house that I’ve never had! :)”

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