Editor’s Notebook: On Miracles

October 2023

We publish small miracles, here at Waterwheel Review. Manifestations of what we crave, help create, and need to share. Three each month of every nine-month season.

Our mission is human connection through art. Art produced and published, we are keenly aware, by plain hard work. That’s why the waterwheel—an engine of labor—is our guiding image, the unbroken circle of the ever-turning wheel moving through water. Lifting and then dropping, and then lifting again, the water always flowing and recombining, both gathering and spreading. Life-giving water.

I said small miracles. How small? How do we even begin to measure their power?

Every piece we present to readers is a blessing of crafted phrases or sentences. But there’s so much more to celebrate than the words; more that is forever unwritten yet contained within a publication’s influence. Each holds the magic that went into the making of it, and then, once it lives, accumulates the resonance of its ripple effects.

Let me be specific. A few examples of the alchemy of human connection in written art:

For a couple of months I struggled to find the right ending to a short story. No more of this absurd flailing, I told myself one night before bed. I read the story straight through, then turned out the light. When I wake up, I’ll know how the story ends. And that is exactly what happened. As I fast-typed the words pouring out of me the next morning, I recognized an image from a conversation with a friend a couple of days before; another from a television show my husband made me watch a few weeks before that; and another from an evening with my sister in my early 20s. Something about my almost-dream-state made me notice some of the life experiences that went into the crafting of that three hundred or so words. Many thanks to my friend, my husband, and my sister.

A woman I know wrote an essay about a dining experience she’d had with a memorable group of people many years ago in a well known NYC restaurant. A friend who read her draft mentioned that she knew someone who had waited tables in that restaurant. A few days later, what do you know—the friend reached out to the former waiter, and just a couple of sentences into the story of the essay, he stopped her. “I remember that group! I WAITED ON THAT TABLE!” What are the odds?? I’m almost salivating as I think of the perspective and detail the former waiter will be able to provide to the author of that essay, adding to its texture and breadth.

Last Thursday afternoon I solved a personal mystery I’ve been wondering about since I was 18 years old. I solved it first through writing about it, second by reading what I wrote to a friend, third by adding more to the text in response to my friend’s feedback. At no point in this process was I actually attempting to solve the mystery, I was just telling a story—a story I have shared with at least a dozen people through the many years since it happened, a story my sister and I have told each other in a hundred different ways, a story that just happens to contain that mystery I couldn’t solve. Until now, by accident, as the solution presented itself while I worked in a couple of additional sentences in response to a question from my friend that, as it happens, had no bearing on it. Surprise!

A few years ago I taught a workshop on very short fiction in a town a couple of hours away. A woman who had lost the love of her life to cancer just a few months before, took the class. The workshop includes time for writing in response to prompts, then sharing the drafts. This woman wrote a perfectly crafted micro so beautiful it brought me to tears. It captured a moment of her partner’s death, so I wasn’t the only one crying. Later she told me this was the first thing she had written about her loss. The piece was published only weeks later without the need to change a single word.

To finish, a Waterwheel Review example: Because our submission process is blind, the cover letter that comes with a submission doesn’t become visible to us until we make a decision to accept or reject. One stunning piece we enthusiastically accepted came with this happy message: The author landed on our website, really liked our vibe, and sat down to write something for us, the very something we were already metaphorically holding to our chest, in a rapture over its beauty. That one miracle alone is enough to reward every drop of energy and work I have put into this magazine.

Last month in this space I was going to share anecdotes about what I and my co-editors did with our summer. Notes about what we wrote in those few months, or stories about writing-related events. As Suzanne reported, we were all hit by urgent, last-minute concerns, so there was only time to wave hello as the season started up, and reaffirm our love for this place. Had I written the planned Editor’s Notebook, I would have confessed that I spent the entire hiatus utterly consumed—to a fault, if I’m honest—by my current nonfiction project. I probably would NOT have said how hard it has been to pull away from that work, just the inch or two required, so I can return to editorial duties. I’m admitting it here to emphasize how much I and my co-editors care about honoring the art and craft of connection through the written word.

It’s not enough to produce my own. To hear, occasionally, about my friends’ writing miracles. I have to foster a community hungry for them. Create more room for them. So when it’s time to report for duty, I put my own work aside and come back to the waterwheel. I’m always glad I did.

In the end that’s what I’m here for—the miracles.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: Look what I just made! On writing Pride.

May 2023

The circle closes. For the second time, I and my co-editors have published our final essay in the 7 Sins of the Writing Life series. With Pride—the good kind, Cheryl tells us, that Aristotle recommends—we conclude our celebration of the collaboration ten years ago that brought us together. Ultimately that collaboration led to the creation of Waterwheel Review, and we’re damn Proud of that.

Cheryl asks: In your writing life, do you experience Pride-as-self-confidence? Or Pride-as-arrogance? Maybe you suffer from Pride-as-undue humility?

I’m not sure if this is a sign of self-confidence or arrogance (it’s definitely not undue humility) but I’m with Aristotle and consider Pride in my work a virtue. Putting my all into everything I write is the key, I think, to why writing keeps me sane. It allows me to put to good use my perfectionism and tendency to ruminate. Of course I’m Proud of that!

Give Cheryl’s essay a read and see where you fall on the Pride scale.

I’ve enjoyed re-reading this series and applying the insights in each piece to my current writing life. Every essay still feels relevant. But in different ways, surely, given how much has changed? To put a bow on this project, I posed a couple of questions about the 7 Sins, now, a decade on, to Cheryl and Suzanne. To be fair, I replied, too.

Which of the 7 Sins has been your biggest challenge since you wrote these essays?

“Lust is equal parts motivator and taunter,” says Cheryl. “I have lusted to create my version of a writer’s life, and I’ve made it happen. But my pursuit has stifled my family’s financial growth. It’s challenging to continue pursuing work that doesn’t pay.”

Suzanne says Gluttony is currently her biggest challenge. “I could produce more drafts if I weren’t so hungry to work over the lines in my current one.” Her writing time is so scarce, having a draft of anything feels lucky, and she can’t let it go. “This one shiny golden draft exists—I can’t even recall how it came to be—and now I want to spend all my writing time digging into it, smoothing it out, expanding, selecting, lengthening, l-e-n-g-t-h-e-n-i-n-g.”

I’m with Cheryl on this one: Lust. In the ten years since we first published the 7 Sins essays, my Lust for All Things Writing Life distracted me too often from my own work. It took the long disruption of the pandemic to teach me that. In the last year, Wrath has been my biggest challenge, as I explain in my answer to the second question below.

Do any of the Sins look different to you now?

Cheryl sees Pride very differently because of the essay she wrote about it ten years ago. “Seeing myself in Aristotle’s ‘undue humble man’ was painful to accept.” Since fully processing that personal revelation, she’s used it to work through the intense feelings of shame that have been central to her poetry. “Shame is stealthier than I ever imagined. The journey has been long, but today, I can say that I’m Proud of the work I’m doing.” 

These days, Envy looks very different to Suzanne. “When we first published the series, I didn’t have a book published. Authors with published books made me Envious.” Now she has three books published herself, and she’s seen how authors get their books published in a surprising variety of ways. “I feel like one of a dedicated crowd, and the Envy has dissolved.”

I have to come back to what I wrote here about Wrath last month. Whenever I’ve experienced Wrath as motivation to write short stories, soon enough the anger was displaced as I became engrossed in the fictional world I created. That’s how I used to experience Wrath in my writing life. But the Wrath that propelled me a year ago into a nonfiction project does not get displaced as I write, it gets examined and re-examined, expressed and elaborated, broken into bits and pieces and then rebuilt. Sitting with all that Wrath can be draining and depressing. The Wrath can take over the prose, too, so I have to be careful about that.

My final 7 Sins sign-off: May you indulge and enjoy all writing sins forevermore. And may you write well today.

In September we kick off our fourth season of this magazine. How that happened, I will never understand, but I couldn’t be more grateful, and I look forward to all the discoveries waiting for us in the fall. For now I leave you with my favorite line from the 7 Sins series, from Cheryl’s essay on Pride: “The writer’s eye never closes.” No, it doesn’t.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: Mad and getting madder. On writing Wrath.

April 2023

I’m very sorry to say that I can’t remember the last time I lived three days in a row without being angry. And usually not just angry. Furious. I bring it on myself, and I’m going to have to keep it up because my work depends on it.

The book I’m writing was birthed in righteous anger. Writing the rage allows me to make meaning from it, maybe even art. But to tell the truth about all that anger, I’ve had to study it. Even wallow in it. And I wonder, as I push on, how much Wrath can writing—good writing—contain? Given all this focus on my own fury, I knew I’d read my co-editor Suzanne’s meditation on Wrath, the penultimate essay in our reprised series, 7 Sins of the Writing Life, in a wholly new way.

When my fiction is inspired by anger, as soon as the story takes hold of me and demands to be written, I rise up and away. The fire can no longer hurt because I experience it as empathy for the character I’ve created. When I worked with Suzanne on this essay ten years ago, that’s how I understood and experienced Wrath in relation to my writing and writing life. But my current work; this outrageous business of writing about my own life… well.

I do not rise. The fire hurts.

“[A]s I think about how Wrath acts—a blind, chaotic, and unstoppable force—it alarms me,” says Suzanne, “that should it go unchecked in our writing lives, it could destroy much more than just our writing.” That alarms me, too. “If we let it, Wrath can steal energy from writing, break professional connections, and destroy nurturing personal relationships in the writing community.” Yes, it can! Shall I tell you how I know that? Another time, perhaps.

But: “Productively using Wrath is like burning the underbrush to prevent a forest fire.”

While my work turns me into a rage-archaeologist, digging around in the dirt of my childhood for the evidence that my Wrath started there (it did, yes), I ask myself how to tame the energy of all that anger, how to avoid stoking it for the sake of the page, how to ensure I keep telling the truth even as I burn. So far, the best answer? Learn from the writers willing to show the way.

Are you writing Wrath? Do you avoid writing Wrath? Take a look at what Suzanne and the writers she consulted have to say about this all-consuming writing-life Sin.

And just for fun, here are my two favorite songs about anger. I took breaks to listen to both as I wrote this post:

Next month, when we publish our final issue of the season, we will complete our essay series with Pride.

May you indulge and enjoy all writing sins forevermore. And may you write well today.

—Claire Guyton