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

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Editor’s Notebook: “On Connection”

Editor’s Notebook: “On Connection”

January 2024

3d rendering of Zen stones in water with reflection

Not every literary magazine aims to make a whole of their individual selections for publication, but we do, at Waterwheel Review, thinking deeply about how accepted pieces speak to and support each other—via theme, voice, approach; even, sometimes, the look on the page. We connect each publication to other art, too—image or video or song—by placing it as the centerpiece of a triptych, and we actively work at linking the triptychs with a color scheme, through repeated elements of images, sometimes via sound. And we select a quote for each issue, one that serves as an umbrella-thought for all three publications.

“I’m obsessed with relationships,” says my co-editor Suzanne, the mastermind of Issue 32. We invest so much in connecting every kind of art on our homepage, threading relationship through it all. Every moment of that work and every element of the outcome feeds Suzanne, and something, some weeks ago, made her wonder what new relationships we might discover at our own website. She suggested that for our January issue, we select a quote that felt right to us for the season—of the calendar and our mission, individually as writers and collectively as co-editors of this magazine—and then go hunting in our archives for pieces that would fit both the quote and each other.

The issue came together quickly, the original triptychs fitting seamlessly together. So satisfying.

Suzanne’s brainstorm makes me think of all the creative connections we make in our own work, once we embrace constraint. Writing prompts work because they harness otherwise inchoate creative energy. Conceits work in a similar way—think a hermit crab essay, a stylized voice, a motif that will not be moved. Applying a “rule” to your work will inspire you to subvert it. I have so many times seen a constraint spark new relationship between apparently disparate images or ideas in my own developing work or that of friends. What a joy to see that same kind of process here, making something wholly new of what we thought we already fully understood.

–Claire Guyton

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Editor’s Notebook: On Writing Discomfort

Editor’s Notebook: On Writing Discomfort

December 2023

looking up at large white christmas lights wrapped around a large oak tree trunk. the lights in the foreground are clear and the background are blurry

As we enter the season of contradiction—decked halls and joyful noise limned by dirty ice and a vicious wind—I’m thinking a lot about memory. It’s my current nonfiction project that’s making me go there; the memoir elements of the book demand an awful lot of digging around in my past. Sometimes I have to prove to myself something really did happen the way I think it did. Sometimes I can’t prove it.

I chatted with a few fellow writers this week about the challenge of writing into and through holes in memory. Very soon we were sighing over the contradiction of memoir, that compulsion to tell the truth of a personal story while being wholly unable ever to tell it full, tell it complete. Then we talked about how uncertain memory might prevent us from being fair to our characters, and by characters we mean our mothers and fathers and first loves and broken friends. It is vital that we are fair to those who betrayed us, we said, and we meant it, all the while never doubting the betrayal.

Does all good writing—good art—rest in contradiction? In our best efforts to resolve it?

I miss my short fiction, I told my friends. I miss being the kingmaker, worldbuilder, puppet-master. I don’t like knowing I might be wrong. In fiction there is no wrong. There is poor, of course. There is boring. But despite what the editor might tell you, there is no moral right and wrong in the story you conceived (and if she tells you there is, get another editor). Fiction just works or it doesn’t. I took for granted that single, simple measuring stick.

For now I try to make friends with contradiction. I say when I don’t remember. I try to balance the betrayal with the revelation. It’s December and midwinter is coming. Seems like exactly the right time to summon that still, small voice. The one that tells the truth.

Whatever kind of truth you’re telling in whatever form, stay with it. We’re not getting any younger, writer friends. Every minute counts.

—Claire Guyton

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From the Editors | Issue #31

December 2023

From the Editors

Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant. —Joan Didion

Editors Cheryl Wilder, Suzanne Farrell Smith, and Claire Guyton in front of the Atlantic ocean in North Carolina on a cool, cloudy day

Issue 31 comes in the month of winter solstice—the shortest day of the year, followed by deepest night. Even as the holiday season takes over, midwinter insists on its quiet still moment; a moment to look into the abyss. Look with Jason Ranek and his “Triptych for the Dead,” but not without a hold on at least one thought for the sublime: the memory, perhaps, of “a wild currant, its little nova on my tongue.” The narrator of Abigail George’s “Not Goodbye,” a lover on borrowed time, doesn’t want to acknowledge the loss and grief that’s coming. Don’t look, then. Just keep to the sublime—“Touch the story on her lips.” Or try looking past the abyss. Look at the moon. “When moon passes overhead, there is a tide that heaves stones up,” says Talley Kayser in “Moonsight,” a woman who sits in borrowed light, watching for shadowplay.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl 

Join Our Growing Community

We’re in our fourth season here at Waterwheel Review, and we couldn’t be happier. But we have big dreams. Right now we have two ways—in addition to being an author or maker—to be a part of our labor of love.

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Editor’s Notebook: A postcard from Maine, November 2023

Editor’s Notebook: A postcard from Maine

November 2023

pieces of bright red and white lobster on a bed of lettuce with lemon and a ramekin of butter next to a lobster shell

My city, Lewiston, Maine, became known this past week for something horrific. You have surely read about the shootings last Wednesday night. Eighteen people gone, thirteen injured. A terrorized city locked down for 40 hours while law enforcement searched for the gunman. Stay away from windows, texted a friend.

It pains me that this is what you know of my city. It pains me that I had to mention it. I want you to think of something else when you think of Maine. You can think of Stephen King, if you like. You can think of snow, lobsters, blueberries. Ice fishing. Moose. Lighthouses. Or you can take a brief trip back in time with me, to enjoy a Maine snapshot I recently discovered myself.

At the Lewiston Public Library, where I manage inter-library loans, hundreds of books pass through my hands every week, each on its way to someone miles away. Someone waiting impatiently, I always think, and quicken my pace as I sort the day’s requested items. I do take a moment to inspect any older, obviously worn book, in case the binding is broken or pages are torn or stained.

A few weeks ago, as I poked at the binding of an old book of essays about Maine cookery, my love for prose about cooking and food took over, and I couldn’t resist sampling the text. I read a few pages before I forced myself to stop and get back to work. Then I did just that, happy in my knowledge that what I had read would serve as the source of my November Editor’s Notebook.

I was going to say something about voice, I think, because I was so charmed by this blast from the past, a Mainer sharing his father’s recipe for chicken dumplings in 1944. Or maybe I would have talked about the relationship between storytelling and food, something I’ve thought about a lot, because food was the only topic that was safe, in my family. We have a story about my mother’s baked beans, my first restaurant meal, a wheel of super-sharp cheddar it took us weeks to eat in thick wedges we sandwiched between pieces of buttered toast. I have literally said the words, “Tell me the one about the baked potatoes, Dad.”

Probably that’s where I would have landed—food and stories. Instead I will cut myself short so I can make the excerpt longer. I will revel again in the passion a Mainer from eighty years ago brought to his description of cooking and then eating Sunday dinner. Literature without labels. Enjoy this bit of Maine you never would have seen, if you hadn’t come here today:

From Mainstays of Maine, by Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Egged on by Ruth P. Coffin.

We start this dish of ours innocently. We start it as if it were going to be just another chicken fricassee. We cook the dismembered bird in an immense iron kettle, with an innocent little onion or two. But when the bird is nearly done, we do a thing that changes meat into magic. We mix up a pint of sifted flour and a half a teaspoon of salt with just enough water to make the flour pliable. Then we roll the whole mass of it out on the breadboard with a rolling-pin. (My father always used an empty bottle of his favorite, green, Irish whiskey, thinking there was some lingering fragrance of a bygone joy capable of being translated by glass to the dumplings.) We roll the dough out till it is thin as the petals of wild roses and as shrinkingly shy and as alive to the touch. Then we slash this cloth of roses made of sensitive flour into quick strips, and drop the strips one by one into the pot with the chicken. Each thin petal sinks out of sight, each independent and not stuck to its companions. And now down there among the chicken bones and flesh, liver and breast and dark meat, each delicate petal ruminates. Then a miracle happens. Each petal suddenly swells, grows, explodes internally in all its cells, suffers a lovely and strange sea-change. And up the petals come, each after each, to the top of the kettle where the golden “eyes of soup” dusk and shrink and expand. The petals have taken up into their beings all the different taste in the several parts of the chicken, in its skin and marrowbones, and they have added a subtle new taste of their own, part flour, part poetry. And when, fifteen minutes after the dumplings have gone to the top of the kettle, we serve the whole works in the largest family soup-tureen, all the family fight for the dumplings, forgetting the Sabbath, forgetting their manners, forgetting the ties of blood. [xvii – xviii]

That’s just one page of the Forward, folks! I can’t wait to read this book.

May you enter the season of eating with a fraction of the joy Robert P. Tristram Coffin found in his kitchen. And may we all hold close every bit of joy we can, wherever we find it.

—Claire Guyton