April 2022

From the Editors

Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words
and everything in the world understands it. —Frances Hodgson Burnett

That was not what I meant at all—this line marks the end of the budding romance in “After Uncle Louie Got Me on Some Nights at the Daily News” by Joe Benevento, a piece about laboring in the act of meaning-making, both in a newspaper’s printing press and with a Bic pen on a pad of paper. “A Brother Is” to love, says Nancy Huggett, but also to lead you down paths of loving that have no answer for disconnection. Her exquisite paean to a sister’s love somehow finds the words. Of birdsong and squawking and chattering “feathery discourse,” Jeff Schiff asks in “Bird Say,” Has to be meaning in it / right? We think there is meaning in it, yes, and Jeff made still more. There are so many beautiful things we understand without words. And then there is so much beautiful art that exists only because we can name things.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl

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January 2022

From the Editors

Truth comes only infrequently and only in flashes. —Pamelyn Casto

Truth pushes to the surface from the start of Ron Riekki’s “idiopathic” as well as in “Movement,” by Ace Boggess, two otherwise very different flashes of beauty. The longer “Greenwich Origin Story,” by Joanna Theiss, keeps its truth hidden until the quiet, unspoken end. Each piece signposts radically different human experience, and our companions highlight the contrasts in tone, particularly the two songs. Issue 14 is a game of emotional ping pong. In real life, no thank you. In art? Give me the bounce, the pop, the smash. Give me flight.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl

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Join Our Growing Community

We’re just getting started 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.

October 2021

From the Editors

None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives. — Jane Austen

Dis-ease, one of us said—Issue 11 is thick with it. Dis-ease through disruption—that’s the source of the energy running through this work. Sherre Vernon in “City Cancels 4^th of July” and Brooke Middlebrook in “Philosophy of the Dance” disrupt their own narratives with borrowed text, layering in more meaning with see-sawing voice and tone. So much of the power of Laine Harrington’s “Philippines, 1973” comes from jarring images and word choices that shove attention from one line to another. Subject, form, and diction are so very different, yet all three pieces feel uneasy and out-of-focus, with protagonists always on the edge of one kind of danger or another. Having spent a year and a half, now, more-or-less sheltering in place… our psyches are ready for a little less stillness.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl

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Join Our Growing Community

We’re just getting started 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.

April 2021

Editor’s Note

I live with my husband and three young sons on the gentle eastern slope of a valley cut through by a creek. The western hill climbs steep and is overspread with boulders carried by an ancient glacier. Stone tossed against stone creates cracks and holes; one triangle crevasse is so deep and dark, we call it the bear cave. It is spring, and my sons tell me the bear will come out soon.

Primarily a creative nonfiction writer, I am motivated by the origins of the verb form of “essay”: to try. I believe literature, unlike much informational and theoretical writing, does not solve so much as it attempts to capture in words ineffable parts of the human experience. Literature does not promise a destination; rather, it creates a new form of transport, a “line of words,” as Annie Dillard says, that moves us to surprising places. Literature may take us on an adventure up a hill to a crack in the granite, where we find shelter, sense daylight, and emerge when hungry.

Our April authors pry open these cracks for me. I find myself entering and re-entering their writing to feel around for what’s there, to witness what comes to light. In Kitty Jospé’s “Where Love Needs No Proof,” a chance meeting results in a single touch, and with it, the narrowest sliver of hope. In Jonie McIntire’s “After You’ve Saved a Life,” out of silence comes a ring, and a voice in need reaches a voice that can help. And in Dawn Denham’s “A Brief History of Blue,” mud wasps nest on a blue porch, the porch hugs a house, and out of that house materializes a reassembled life.

Our companions this month lead me to surprises as well. The son of two former slaves becomes an icon of the American folk music revival, often writing songs in the aftermath of tragic river floods. A Greek immigrant uses elemental color to create vibrant images that seem to dance on the page. A tower of humans balances upon the strength of one, on the soles of his feet, simply to show that it’s possible, that it’s beautiful. And hidden inside blustering Tweets, we find, of all things, love.

Last week, the first wasp made its way through my attic vent. The first stinkbug buzzed through the hole in our screen door. The first tulips pushed through the mulch by the fence. It is April, and with these tiny births—encounters and phone calls and houses, wasps and tulips and awakening bears—the world is made new.

Suzanne Farrell Smith