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

By

Editor’s Notebook: On Mirage & the Mighty Semicolon

Editor’s Notebook: On Mirage & the Mighty Semicolon

April 2024

I’m hurtling towards another birthday. At my age birthdays take on serious weight—Yet another of my vanishing supply of years logged, I think, even as I look forward to the day. I will meet with a good friend I rarely get to see, and I know she and my husband will make me feel particularly special, so all good. Even better if marking the day releases me from the state I’ve been in for many weeks. That’s what I have believed—that it’s this coming birthday that has been knocking me sideways. Because my thinking, lately, is all over the place, my writing is ragged, and my ambition is… fragile. But just today, as I let my fingers go to work on this keyboard, I realize I’m feeling what I’m feeling mainly because of something else.

What’s the opposite of hurtling? Inching. Creeping. Sludging. Not a word, but I like it, the mud of it, the cold and dense feel of it. My thinking is all over the place, my writing is ragged, and my ambition is fragile because I’m sludging towards the end of my manuscript, finally oh finally. Despite the incredibly slow pace the end is very much in sight. Pretty sure that’s it, because, I have to say, getting so close to the end, much to my sad surprise, doesn’t feel great.

For two years and three months, I’ve been thinking about this project. For a year and almost nine months, I’ve been writing it. I’ve neglected everything else in my life to stay focused on this work, and that glimpse of the completed manuscript has been out there like a glistening mirage, My Reward. My cool drink, soft place to fall. I’m reaching, reaching… and now I’m about to get there. I expected to feel fantastic! But no. When I do get there, I see now, I will be forcefully reminded that mirages are not real. A mirage is pretty brain-fog.

Well, at least it’s pretty. That’s what my mom would say. But fog is fog. You just have to wonder at it and hope it clears, soon.

When I say my ambition is fragile, I mean my ambition to finish this book and make it good is wobbling. Very quietly that voice is speaking up, the one that tells me I’ve been wasting my time. For about a year and seven months, when that voice spoke, I shouted it down. For weeks I’ve been unable to do that. Maybe because my thinking is all over the place. Or because I don’t trust this ragged writing. Or because I don’t need reminding that mirages are not real and I know, subconsciously, exactly what’s waiting for me. Whatever the reason, these things—the monkey mind, the rough draft that refuses to polish, the dawning belief that no one cares about what I’m writing—it’s all of a piece and each one feeds the other two.

Yeah, sludging along. Mucking through. Mudding my way to mirage.

Which is all to say that I feel like every other writer who has ever lived. I’m in a down-spell. I’m tired and worried all this work is for nothing. I’m in the sludge and I know YOU have been in the sludge so let’s just remind each other that down-spells don’t last, and tomorrow’s another day, and a cri de coeur about something this mundane really shouldn’t surpass 600 words.

The Barbara Feinberg quote we used for this issue—”It was as if, through that one sentence, she had wandered out of the yard of her usual language, and found herself in a different, mysterious, elegant part of town”—is from an essay I hope you’ll read and enjoy as much as I did. The essay is about a mother’s (thankful) restraint in wanting to critique her young daughter’s piece of creative writing, and what she, the mother, gains from attending to, instead, what her daughter likes about the piece. She marvels at the wonder the girl finds in one of the sentences, a sentence that hadn’t stood out in the mother’s reading. The sentence contains a semicolon, and this is what Feinberg says about that:

[I]t was one of the first times she’d ever ventured to use a semi-colon, and we both agreed that it added to the sentence’s allure. She loved semi-colons, she told me, and by way of expressing why, she put up one hand to denote Stop, and with the other hand, waved me to Go. A semi-colon seemed to tell you both things at once. Coincidentally, I had had a similar association to semi-colons as a child: the period over the comma was like a half-hinged door; it suggested a creaky lock on an old gate that you get to slip through into another world, even though you’re not exactly supposed to.

I love this description of the semicolon, and nodded as I read it, even as it reminded me that I had once written something about the semicolon, too, and it wasn’t favorable. Only a few days ago, I had been delighting in a semicolon I’d so perfectly placed—how could I ever have felt anything but love? It took this essay to remind me of the error of my former ways, though I couldn’t remember exactly what I’d said. Happily, the Internet remembers.

In a brief, written Q&A I did for Mid-American Review, who published one of my microfictions, I said this about the semicolon, in response to the request to share something strange about myself related to writing: “I almost never use a semicolon because I find the mark unattractive. It’s such a shame, because the work a semicolon does is so quietly lovely—its whole sentence-aura is understated elegance, inviting thoughtful, well-constructed sentences. Yet that blotty speck over the comma… ugh. I just can’t.”

I said that in the summer of 2015. I’m relieved that even then I understood well what a semicolon can do for a sentence. Thankfully, in some moment I didn’t notice, the semicolon acquired to my eye the loveliness on the page that befits the work it does, and I now have no idea why I ever thought any other way about it. When I was admiring that semicolon last week, it was because of my delight in how it distributed equal weight of significance on either side. Delicious!

A writer’s cri de coeur, mundane pique in the face of totally ordinary frustrations; it is the semicolon that is needed, here, yes? The thinnest, slightest, black-and-white metaphor to the rescue, in the form of a blotty speck over a comma.

There is a semicolon between rough draft and final. Between the 100,000-word blurt and finely pruned manuscript. I’m almost there, at the old gate, with that creaky lock on top. When I get there the mirage will disappear and I will remember that it was pretty fog; pretty enough to keep me going, foggy enough to keep me curious. Then I will remember that there is just as much meaning and purpose on the other side of the gate, and that fog always clears.

Whether you’re walking straight and sturdy in boots made to last twenty years or tottering along in stilettoes you damn well know you shouldn’t have even considered wearing, it doesn’t matter. Fragile, robust, who cares. Fast, slow, sludge and mud, what difference does it make? You’re here, now. And fog always clears.

—Claire Guyton