March 2021

Editor’s Note

John Prine was one of my favorite writers. When he died of Covid, I took a day off to mourn him. As always, I found refuge in his lyrics. 

His songs are full of stories that somehow marry goofiness, poignancy, and deep sadness. Despite appreciation for his work, my husband can listen to Prine only in short spurts or he will sink into melancholy. I’m so surprised by this, because it’s the sadness that I appreciate most. Writing that captures our worries and griefs comforts me. No, much more. It buoys me. I rise.

All genuine hardship and loss boil down to the same elemental pain, and no one gets through this life unscathed. How lucky we are to see the proof—in prose, verse, music, painting—that we are not alone with our dark thoughts, this trembling uncertainty, that moment of boiling rage. I am channeled, and so I am heartened and then fortified. Now I’m ready to give it all another go.

As our March issue goes live, I am channeled by Erica Kent’s “The Shut-In,” a piece starring a version of myself I work hard not to be, and I know I am far from alone in that, as the pandemic has shown so many of us. In Danielle Joffe’s “Reduction,” I am heartened by a kind of courage I’ve had to summon myself, as have all the women I know. And “My New York Accent” by Anne Myles fortifies the “I am who I am” confidence we’re all building and rebuilding. 

I cried at my last John Prine concert. When he hit the stage, strumming and singing, his age knocked me back, and I knew that he would die before I could see him again. As he performed a rough and speedy version of “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore,” I put my face in my hands and wept. Then I wiped my tears and sank into him and his music, savoring every syllable, every note. Every sad smile.

Claire Guyton

December 2020

Editor’s Note

The work of this issue is so beautiful, so weirdly wonderful in its different shapes and voices. No pressure, dear December authors—Liam Strong, Nancy Jorgensen, Shannon Bowring—but for me, your work, woven together, comes with a prescription for 2021.

This year has been so steeped in crisis, it’s hard for many of us to consider what came just before. I was already avoiding backward looks before 2020 dawned, and was so thankful, as we counted off those final days of 2019, to see the new year.

In early August 2019, my father had the stroke that killed him two weeks later. Six weeks after that, my mother died in particularly painful and distressing circumstances. The rest of the year was a blur.

By February 2020, I was beginning to feel a little like myself. Pushing through my days became less difficult, my head began to lift. Then… well. All the events that have inspired the habit of a head shake accompanied by the muttered “2020” began to unfold.

My 2019 strategy was to keep my fogged head down and push through, whispering, “This, too, shall pass.” It worked well enough while life, arranged around my confusion of grief, more or less conformed to experience. But here we are, nearing the end of an extraordinary year leading to the next extraordinary year, and I have no idea exactly what’s going to pass, what the passing will look like, and how long it will take.

No lowered head, no closed eyes. No whispering.

I’m doing two things this month to say a firm goodbye to 2020 and walk with intention and strength into whatever the next year holds: Taking stock and making joy.

I’m moved in our December publications by the stories of how we’re made by family and place, by intergenerational connection and disconnection, by deeply personal gain and loss. The events of 2020 and especially the pandemic have inspired reflection on exactly these things, and I am so grateful, given my 2019, for reminders of others’ stories, for every dose of empathy that pulls me back to community. So much the better when the art of the delivery brings joy.

I’m transported by this issue into the lives—real or imagined, the meaning is as deeply felt—very like me or completely unlike me; so close I can feel their breath or presented in whole image, like a painting that shows me something different depending on my sightline. And the art. Dense and chaotic (Strong’s “oil spill”), ordered and lightly spaced (Jorgensen’s “A Thing of Beauty”), strung along the page like birdsong (Bowring’s “Avian Elegies”).

This work, laced together with companion pieces ranging from the gifts of nature, to a beloved master like Patti Smith, and the generous artists Maggie Lach and Deb Farrell, helps me both take clear-eyed stock of loss—personal and communal—and remember what it is to make joy. And share it.

Claire Guyton

September 2020

Editor’s Note

I feel reckless.

On January 17, and seven years after our first conversation about starting a literary magazine, I emailed my friends Cheryl Wilder and Suzanne Farrell Smith with this question: Waterwheel Review. Where are we?

After years of stopping and starting, and at least two target launch dates scheduled and then allowed to pass, I was ready to hit go. Or… just go. Maybe we could never make room in our lives for this particular labor of love.

List-maker, double-bagger, belt-and-braces Suzanne stunned me with her reply: I feel reckless. Then Cheryl: Fuck it.

We couldn’t have guessed then or by February 29 when our sample issue went live, that by mid-March Cheryl and Suzanne would be homeschooling their children, and I would be working an improvised version of my library job at home. Or that time would feel so vast and slow yet leave so little space—outside the new hygiene and safety protocols, the learning curve required for transporting all human interaction to Zoom, the absorption of information on case numbers and symptoms and methods of transmission—for any labors of love.

If we had known what was coming, we wouldn’t have allowed ourselves to be reckless. Waterwheel Review would still be a project-in-waiting, or, possibly, a project abandoned. And I wouldn’t be thinking about how the three publications in our first issue form, for me, a grand, deeply rich meditation on the passage of time, the lifeline or leash of love, our need to transmute fleeting human experience into art. I wouldn’t marvel at how all three play with surreal narration—Christina in a voice effortlessly moving back and forth through space and time; Jefferson in the simple, modern language of his nonplussed protagonist; and Sofia using the lavish imagery of a fable.

If we had known what was coming, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the thrill of recognition when I first read “Three Women Writing Around My Head”—submitted blind, per our guidelines—and knew the author had to be fellow Mainer Jefferson Navicky. “I will not be voting on this one,” I said, recusing myself without explanation, and sat in silence while my co-editors discussed whether we would accept a piece I wanted so badly (I didn’t suffer long). I wouldn’t now savor this extra spoonful of sweetness in publishing a friend, nor could I extend the treat with a Q&A about his connection to Maine’s robust history of women writers.

If we had known what was coming, “Until the Charm Fades,” the music Charlie Rauh wrote to serve as a companion to his sister Christina’s publication, wouldn’t exist. But we didn’t know. And here we are, reveling in all this art we get to showcase, celebrating this new small community of makers, and glorying in literature without labels.

I have no children to homeschool, so it’s easy for me to say it: I’m glad—so very, very grateful—that we didn’t delay our launch once again. Right now in the time of face masks and hand sanitizer and curbside pickup? I need exactly this kind of reckless.

Claire Guyton