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

Elizabeth Bedell

The Shawl

by Elizabeth Bedell

April 2023

On this almost bitter-cold February morning, watching the world ripen into light, I shiver. I look around for the fuzzy blue-gray shawl, so old its neat weave has softened to a cloudy thickness. I imagine it draped across the ivory slipcovers, waiting for the next pair of hands to unfold it, spread it over shoulders, tuck it around a sleeping child. I wait for invisible hands to tuck it around me, for the whispered promises that all is well, will be well, that all manner of things shall be well.

The shawl disappeared in the move this past November, though I could have sworn I bundled it carefully around my mother’s tea pot and mugs, cushioning them from the brawny college kids lugging the boxes, from the upheaval itself. But when I finally unpacked that box, weeks later, bubble wrap enfolded the tea set. Effective enough, but soulless.

It’s a small grief, to be sure, amid the many larger ones, stacked into a chord. It’s become a cliché, and I flinch as I write each morning, “living in the key of grief.” But somehow it’s the only way I can conceptualize this stretch of my life, the world’s life.

Both because of the comforting structure of music theory, the way a few chicken-scratched sharps or flats cue a sound palette when I glance at a new score, preparing me for the notes to come. C minor. E major—that Chopin “tristesse” étude I keep playing these days.

And because I am Mary Lennox, alone and uncertain, seeking the old, rusted key that will unlock the door, unlock the promise of the sleeping, secret garden, enclosed and nearly forgotten. Convinced that there is, will be, some way to make meaning of all this.

Two nights ago I had such a clear dream of sitting in my favorite chair, wrapped up in that shawl, opening a book and getting lost in it again, as I haven’t in years. I miss disappearing into a book, so consumed by the unspooling story that I know when I close the volume all will again be well.

Mary had a helpful robin, leading her to that buried key. But I—well, the robins are weeks, months away, the polar vortex is what’s wrapping itself around us, and the shawl seems to have evaporated into thin air, lost in the translation between households, between before and now.

Elizabeth Bedell completed her MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts in 2019. Elizabeth is a longtime high school English teacher, who finds herself querying her first novel. She lives in western Massachusetts.