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.

Anne Myles

An Origin Story

by Anne Myles

October 2022

Miss Truth and Beauty my parents called me, with that teasing edge. I put the Keats lines in my
high school yearbook. I wanted what was honest, if not always easy. They found it funny but a
bit trying. I did not think myself unkind. And I yearned for beauty—whatever that was. I was a
devotee of something I could barely understand.

Many years went by.

He wouldn’t tell her she had dementia. He wouldn’t speak the terrible name, its scarlet letter of
decay—if that was even what she had; he never took her to be tested, for then she’d know. I want
to preserve her dignity, he said. Obedience clogged my throat like mucus. What dignity is there
in life, I thought, without facing the truth?

One night I found her up for the third time, dressed, brushing her teeth—about to head
downstairs to make the first of many breakfasts, cups of warm juice and plates of rock-hard
bagels covering the table. She would not listen. He was lost in sleep with his pills. A gust rushed
through me and I hissed, Go back to bed Alzheimer’s bitch!

She pulled my hair and spat at me. My brilliant mother, whom I’d loved. I felt it claim me then,
that truth I couldn’t part from; whoever I’d turn into would have to say it, say it, say it. And
whatever beauty I found in words would come with this: the image of my own ugliness, turning
and turning forever behind my eyes.

Anne Myles is the author of What Woman That Was: Poems for Mary Dyer (Final Thursday Press, 2022). Her work appears in On the Seawall, North American Review, Split Rock Review, Whale Road Review, Lavender Review, and elsewhere. She’s a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee and was co-winner of the 2022 ellipsis Award. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts.