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.

Kathleen McGookey

Beginning with a Line from Roethke

by Kathleen McGookey

March 2024

I, too, have known the inexorable sadness of pencils, the Dixon number 2’s my sister-in-law mailed after Van died, twelve boxes, so old their erasers left fleshy smears instead of rubbing out my mistakes. What happened to his greenhouse, bought in Denmark? To his hoses and ropes and terra cotta pots stained white with minerals? His tulip bulbs, seed catalogs, broken Underwood typewriter? He had been dying so slowly it seemed just like living. This was after the virus but before the vaccine. Should we have driven through the night, slept in the van, waved at his picture window? We didn’t know. We didn’t know that afternoon at the lake, five years ago, would be the last. What happened to his cookbooks, bundt pan, whistling teakettle? The child-sized red wooden shoes from Holland? His ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder, displayed for decades on the bookshelf behind glass doors, and leaning beside it, the sloppy stack of reels, safeguarding his children’s voices?

In 2024, Kathleen McGookey has a chapbook, Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks), and a book, Paper Sky (Press 53), forthcoming. Her work has recently appeared in Copper Nickel, Epoch, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and Willow Springs.