Dear Readers,

When we launched Waterwheel Review, we were keen to explain why we were so moved and motivated by the image of the waterwheel. Water stands for language, an ever flowing, renewable source; the waterwheel, an engine of labor, circles through, lifting words and then dropping them back into the running stream. Our magazine is a mill, we said, where the waterwheel powers writing and publishing. “We want—and need—to make things.”

For a couple of years, now, we have known that we can’t make enough of our own things while we give so much energy to the work of others. We have had to cut substantially the time and attention devoted to our own writing, and mostly we have been glad to do it, determined to find a way to repay our own work in the end. We never did find that way.

If we could quit our jobs and earn that income publishing this magazine, we would take that deal in an instant. But that’s not the world we live in. For many, many months we have known this, but we couldn’t accept it until now. And thank goodness for that.

Every single issue of this magazine has been a wonder that transported and enchanted us. We can’t say we gloried in every moment. We read or edited or built the site at times while sick, exhausted, grieving—that’s the nature of any publication. But we damn well gloried in every word, every paired image and sound.

Four years and thirty-six issues: What an honor to publish our contributors. What a privilege to offer stunning work to our readers. We must use the word pleasure, too, always rolled out to accompany “honor and privilege,” but pleasure isn’t strong enough, nor is gratitude nor joy nor blessing. For once we find ourselves at a loss for words to express precisely what it has meant to keep this waterwheel turning.

Maybe this will do it: How many times does anyone ever fully achieve the glittering, half-glimpsed vision floating above; that winking, flirting piece of art we ache to manifest? For the three of us, precisely this once.

We will keep making things and so will you. We started this magazine with the image of the waterwheel and a Jean Rhys quote, and we will end in the same way, as we thank you for reading and submitting, and wish you and yours all the very best:

Listen to me. All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. And there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don’t matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl

September 1, 2024: Waterwheel Review will stay online for the foreseeable future. It remains as it looked for the final June 2024 issue.

Waterwheel Review

Literature Without Labels

Lisa Creech Bledsoe

While Looking for Eating Utensils in My Uncle’s Kitchen

by Lisa Creech Bledsoe

May 2021

Carrying in the last tomato of the year, Black Cherokee, smoky
and shining, I think: My great-grandmother used to grow these, too.

I love that my uncle’s kitchen has four front doors
all open to the drowsy Kentucky river. It smells like

basil, wood ash, and castile soap in here, like home.
Looking for a knife, I open a likely drawer, but find only keys,

washers, and drill bits. One more drawer then: zip ties,
paracord, paint stirrers. Nearby is the pint jar of honey

I brought as a gift, white soft comb adrift in amber.
A colander’s in the sill, filled with drying beans: Red Eye, Big John,

and Betsy Best Greasy, named for a friend of the family when they—
the beans, that is—were found in her freezer thirty-five years after she died.

All saved, passed down. Two bone saws for cleaning deer
hang beside the sink; both have the word CREECH written

on the wooden grip in my father’s and grandfather’s careful hand.
My uncle told me that my father’s felt hat—on the peg nearby—was

too big for Dad, just right for a younger brother. When I first saw it
he also showed me a handmade gritting board made in 1975, perfect

for late milk stage corn, best cornmeal ever. My father’s name is penciled
on that too, along with my grandfather’s. I am enfolded in light and

reflection. The corn mill clamped on one of six wood tables in here
is not used much. Uncle Mark said grain has to be ground three or

four times in it. If you only do it once though it’s fine for chickens.
Mostly our family gets cornmeal from cousins Hoss and Coke

who use the grinder the family bought in 1915—strapped it to a Model T
pickup tire with a leather belt about fifteen feet long. The truck’s

long busted; now my cousins rig the grinder (new stones, cleaned bearings,
even gold lettering restored at the factory where it was originally built)

for meal and a fair bit of drinking makes it a party. Sometimes
with incidents. I still can’t find a knife in my uncle’s kitchen

but there are eight different antique wooden chairs in here,
one made from willow by the Romani gypsies who camped

in my great-grandmother’s holler and gave her a set for letting them
stay there each year. I open an apothecary cabinet in a spill

of sun pouring down from the cupola. Drawers marked hooks, lag screws,
and “soprglo”—superglue—in my uncle’s son’s hand from when he was three.

No kitchen utensils. A jar of marbles, the ticking wood stove, paintings
by my uncle Mike: daffodils, a sycamore, one with the words “Blue Moon

of Kentucky.” I count thirty quarts of heirloom tomatoes, jars of grits, oats,
dried apples, and turnip seeds; dozens of arrowheads and a stone axe.

A duffel bag that looks like my father’s. Likely is. And finally
a knife. But nowhere a fork. I smile and slice the last Black Cherokee

of the year carefully in my hands over the sink and eat it
with my fingers, washed, wrapt in home and October sun.

Lisa Creech Bledsoe is a hiker, beekeeper, and writer living in the mountains of western North Carolina. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and the author of Appalachian Ground (2019) and Wolf Laundry (2020). She has new poems out in Sky Island Journal, Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel, Red Fez, and River Heron Review, among others. She writes at AppalachianGround.com.