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

Anne Myles

My New York Accent

by Anne Myles

March 2021

Was evident on my voicemail, my friend said, and though she swore she was fond of it I recorded the greeting again and again until it no longer said seven oh nine faw. I think.

My New York accent makes my insides clench a little when I’m reading aloud and see a danger word approaching. Wawl, tawl, smawl. But there are others I don’t even hear. I have to kind of dissociate and not think about it.

Not think about what my students hear. A New York accent enthusiastic about the Puritans and Emily Dickinson. And the fast talking. 

My New York accent is worse than my parents’ despite my fancy private education. It rolled its eyes at the high school classmate who spent the summer in England and came back sounding like a Brit. But when I went to England my throat tightened at the thought of speaking. I nodded and pointed, or whispered.

Another friend posted the quiz, “What food does your voice sound like?” Duh. Bagels and lox. Or maybe smoked whitefish, is that fancier? My New York accent marks me, as if I dropped some whitefish on my pant leg and hours later catch a whiff of it in public.

My New York accent is lonely for its vocabulary. I swallowed my Yiddish words in my first week of college, startled at how many there were. When they slip out, it feels a rush of delight and transgression.

My New York accent has a lot to say, but usually tries to hold back. Still, under duress it will tell you to go fuck yourself sideways. Not ladylike? I’ll give you ladylike.

Over and over people say, “You’re from New York, aren’t you?” and maybe it’s just a conversation-starter but I hear: You’re not one of us. All I can think about is how they’re putting my voice and my Yiddishe punim together and thinking Jew, Jew, Jew. And my New York accent wants to ask, so when the Nazis come, are you going to hide me? 

It’s pretty skeptical about that. And ponders privately the ways I am and am not whitepeople. A conundrum.

It thinks about how little you know about me. I’m five boroughs and the mouth of the Hudson, and the cliffs of the Palisades. I’m full of the space between brooding mountains. The gentle rise and fall of farmland. The sage-smelling badlands out west.

I’m the island people sail away from, not the one they dream of coming to.

My New York accent is consumed by hunger, and not just for the memory of chopped liver, gefilte fish, Italian ices, flat greasy pizza slices on a paper plate. Oh so much more. It wants to hear the words beneath the accent, the syntax, the music. It wants to wail like the sirens on First Avenue in the middle of the night.

It longs to transcend itself, yet knows it’s faithful as a farting dog.

It runs helplessly after iambs, trying to remake itself as pure heartbeat. As if it could find a new way to speak. As if it could become beauty. As if it could find the proper language to ask the eternal question, but can you love me? Can you not leave?

Anne Myles is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Northern Iowa, and is currently completing an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has appeared in the North American Review, Lavender Review, Green Briar Review, Whale Road Review, and other journals. She lives in Waterloo, Iowa, and hopes to move back east within a year or two.