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January 1, 2022 By Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: January 2022

Editor’s Notebook

January 2022

Our final issue of Waterwheel Review’s second year will be May 2022, so we’re still well into our editing season. But here I am, at the end of 2021, and I’m enjoying all the “Best of” articles and lists. I have to jump in! And so… rather than sharing here my usual “Writer’s Notebook”—a spotlight on a publication from our first season—the very occasional “Editor’s Notebook” is born.

See below a year-end spotlight on Waterwheel Review in 2021, plus a few photos just for fun. Future Editor’s Notebook posts will provide a peek behind the editorial curtain.

— Claire Guyton

white woman in red dress with blue flowers in the kitchen chopping mushrooms with black and white cat on her shoulders staring out the window

Best Editor Moment of 2021

Claire: I read Ron Riekki’s revealed cover letter after accepting “idiopathic” (appearing in this issue), and discovered that he had written this piece specifically with Waterwheel Review in mind. That, alone, makes every instant (and cent) devoted to this magazine more than worth it.

Suzanne: While hunting for companion pieces to complement Kate Senecal’s “Nina Simone” (Issue #12, November 2021), I landed on a site devoted to vintage photos of pitbulls and their children. Some 60+ images of kids and dogs, all steeped in loyalty and love.

Cheryl: The version of “Mad World” we’re using as a companion to “Greenwich Origin Story” in this issue is (sorry, Tears for Fears) the only version for me. It’s so beautifully sad. Choosing this song and then Pharrell’s “Happy,” and then experiencing both on the homepage, in all their glorious contrast, was deeply satisfying.

Best Online Piece 2021

Claire: I almost can’t believe how carefully and beautifully Alice Gribbin has articulated this argument about our current, impoverished cultural narrative on art.

fake decorated Christmas tree with angel on top halfway covered by a tree bag

Suzanne: A Covid snapshot that inspires, by Sabrina Hicks.

Cheryl: I found a piece (published in 2020)—poetry as dictionary definition—by Danielle Cadena Deulen and immediately bought one of her books. To me, that warrants making our 2021 list.

Favorite Candid Christmas Pic

Claire: Behold my solution to the problem of owning two cats that see a Christmas tree as a personal mission of destruction. Seven tree-less years preceded the Googling brainstorm that led to this life-transforming purchase. A CHRISTMAS MIRACLE.

Suzanne: My family’s annual search for the “perfect” tree (read, to my husband, right height / right width / right shape / right fullness) was helped this year by three sons (one 9-year-old and twin 7s) who are big enough to help carry the beauty over the river and through the woods.

Cheryl: In March 2021, my family lost both of our elder pets. We adopted “Christmas kittens” the week before Thanksgiving, hoping they would settle in by Christmastime. A successful decision.

white man and son in a cut your own Christmas tree farm on a foggy day

Filed Under: Editor's Notebook

December 1, 2021 By Claire Guyton

Writer’s Notebook: “Avian Elegies”

Writer’s Notebook: “Avian Elegies”

Published December 2020, Issue #4

bird feathers falling in front of black background

I feel a curious mix of melancholy and hope as I read our current issue and linger on the images and songs chosen as companions. Even the Tibetan singing bowl sounds both sad and joyful. I love this kind of blending of dark and light, because it reminds me to look for beauty and grace in what is hard and painful. More, it reminds me to live deeply my uncrowded, unshaded moments. It reminds me to be grateful. Why, then, does this issue bring to mind so palpably a piece that does not read as a blend of dark and light at all, but is, I would argue, probably our darkest publication?

I just re-read Shannon Bowring’s “Avian Elegies” once again. There isn’t much, if any, light in the storytelling (the Vivaldi, I think, but others might disagree). But yes, for me it captures that same pleasing sadness, that dark pulse of joy that I relish. Read it and tell me if you agree: The light that accompanies the dark comes from the song of the lines, the rhythm of the refrain. The simple (painful) beauty of the images woven throughout the piece, and the music of “Little darling, baby bird.” The accrued meaning of the telling is almost completely dark. But the manner of telling is so lovely that it combines with the one light brushstroke of telling (I’m right, it’s the Vivaldi!) to lift the narrative partly from the shadows by the end. Alchemy.

Shannon isn’t sure herself how she pulled it off. Here’s what she says about it:

lone row boat in ocean with big sky

When I submitted “Avian Elegies” to Waterwheel Review, I noted in my cover letter that the story had “burst out of me one morning seemingly out of nowhere, and after it was done, I wasn’t quite sure what it was.” Over a year after writing the story, I still don’t really know what this piece is, and that’s what I love most about it. The more I write, the more I believe a story does not need to fall into a specific, easy-to-define genre or category. And the more I write, the more I understand inspiration for a story never comes from one clear source but from a lovely, messy jumble of disparate images, dreams, impressions, and memories. Some of the scenes in “Avian Elegies” are drawn from my own experience (a grandfather’s boat on a distant lake, greedy seagulls in a hospital parking lot), but most of the story (missing sisters and dead birds with rainbow plumage) is part of that jumble. An indefinable mix of grief and love and blood and magic. A little bit like life itself.

I have very fond memories of finding our companion pieces for this publication. If you’ve never seen Audubon’s prints in Birds of America, treat yourself to this video we included in our homepage triptych. Here’s an article we considered using, that includes another great (much shorter) video about a ritual page-turning of one of these books held currently at Bowdoin College in Maine—I love this video so much, but we couldn’t resist the previous one because of the absolute feast of prints included.

And here’s a special offering from our Suzanne Farrell Smith, the WWR team’s sweetest voice. I mean that literally, as you’ll discover if you listen to this personal recording (using just her cell phone), of one of her favorite bedtime lullabies for her boys, “Memorial Song.” As a companion to “Avian Elegies” we used Patti Smith’s version, because its sad-sweet inspiration, the death of Smith’s close friend, seemed like the appropriate context. But we gave Suzanne’s rendition a shot, because we love her voice as accompaniment to this piece that reads so much like a song, and we hankered for that raw immediacy of a personal, unadulterated recording. It wasn’t dark, we realized, and this piece, as I’ve been saying, demanded dark. So we went with Patti, but Cheryl and I dined on Suzanne’s recording for a few days, and I still hold it in my heart. Thank you, Suzanne, for letting me post it here.

Thanks again to Shannon Bowring for letting us showcase her work. Work that, as it happens, was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2021 anthology, out NOW from Sonder Press. Congratulations, Shannon!

—Claire Guyton

Filed Under: Writer's Notebook

December 1, 2021 By Claire Guyton

From the Editors | Issue #13

December 2021

From the Editors

The best way out is always through. —Robert Frost

Moving from the known to the unknown, searching for—and sometimes finding?—a kind of acceptance, a kind of peace; that’s the project of our 13th issue. In Christina Hutchins’s “Traveling through the Vanishing Point,” we drive through the salt flats of Utah and deeply into a pearly Sunday morning’s revelation of life and love everlasting. Breath is the mode of travel in Carlene Gadapee’s guide into the space that holds her narrator’s suspended present—a space between meaningful and meaningless, between everything and nothing. “Breathing Exercises” asks… what do we do in that space? And what do we do, asks Deanna Benjamin, with a friend’s story that has its beginning and end but comes with no closure, no fullness of understanding? Benjamin’s protagonist does her best to accept it. She walks “The Delicate Periphery of Your Crime” and offers whatever support she can. Moving, breathing. Accepting. It’s the only way.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl


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Filed Under: From the Editors

November 1, 2021 By Claire Guyton

Writer’s Notebook: “Sink or Swim”

Writer’s Notebook: “Sink or Swim”

Published January 2021, Issue #5

abstract seagull a couple shades deeper than the sea background
Sea Glass in oil on canvas by Sandra York.

Reader, I need you to understand me, because my co-editors do not: The presentation of a Waterwheel Review issue—the text-boxed excerpts from the three new publications, the companion pieces and background images chosen to appear with each, the quote we hang over them all—is available, in all its homepage-scrolling glory, for one single month only.* The publications remain at the site, of course, and we have archives depicting the original homepage triptychs. But that issue’s presentation, and the homepage experience of it? Gone forever. This is painful for me. It’s why I spend so much time on our homepage. I scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. And scroll. 

For my co-editors this quirk of our publishing model is entirely a source of joy. The coming loss just sweetens the experience of a “live” issue. Yes, sand mandalas. Yes, The Wisdom of Insecurity. I know. I know. Knowing doesn’t erase the strange little pulse of heartache I feel when an issue gets replaced. 

The sense of loss limning the almost giddy bloom of happiness that overtakes me when I get the text—We are live!—can only be soothed in two ways. (1) A marathon of new scrolling, of course. (2) A visit to the Archives page to be reminded of former scrolling-love. I start using that second strategy at least a week before the new issue goes up, and always as my thoughts leap from the new pieces about to be published to the ones that live on our site already, one former publication will jump out and demand new attention. That’s the piece I settle on for a Writer’s Notebook.

Heather Diamond’s “Sink or Swim” is the perfect last-season companion to Issue #12. In our editors’ note, we called this issue a meditation on human connection, which is exactly how I feel about “Sink or Swim.” Here’s a note from Heather on her inspiration for the piece, and the process of pulling it together:

“Sink or Swim” did not start as a triptych lyric essay. It grew from fragments and juxtapositions as well as my background in folklore studies. I wrote the last section first, the part about a children’s dilemma game that I remembered playing with other girls. Working with the details in that scene reminded me of a stalled essay I’d written about teaching in which I had described a similar dilemma I’d used as a classroom exercise. When I juxtaposed those scenes, I realized they shared water settings and were both about deciding whether to save a partner or a child. That was when I connected them to a discarded section from my memoir in which my daughter and I argued about life choices and blood ties. From there, the mother/child theme took over through the extended water metaphor as I considered “how water sings to blood” and the what-ifs and consequences of the choices we make when it comes to love. In the final edits, I rearranged the panels to “sink” backward to childhood and linked the sections by adding the subtitles. In writing as in life, some choices choose us.

In my first two Writer’s Notebooks, I included notes on companion pieces we considered but didn’t select for the publication I spotlighted. I won’t do that here because I have to use this opportunity instead to get more eyes on my favorite companions in Season One, a video (see below) that still makes me gasp, and a painting (see above) by Sandra York, a friend of Heather, that captures perfectly the feeling of “Sink or Swim.” Enjoy!

Magical ice-skating video from northern Finland wows viewers
Clicking on the video will take you away from the Waterwheel Review website.

All my thanks to Heather Diamond for helping to soothe this month’s heartache, while adding another layer to the thrill of new work. 

–Claire Guyton

*Excepting the May issue—that one was up through our summer hiatus (and I very much enjoyed all the extra scrolling).

Filed Under: Writer's Notebook

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