April 2023

From the Editors

Spring has arrived with all its blush and promise. By happy accident, we three women of Waterwheel Review get to spend our renewed energy on female vision, power, and connection in Issue #26. Donna Obeid’s “Omnia Vanitas,” one woman’s map to rapture, begins with the eternally good counsel, “Don’t be tricked by the knights. Don’t follow them into the forest.” Anna Citrino’s “Remembering Adella” honors a mother’s legacy of dedication and back-breaking labor, “Every action a prayer of submission to necessary work.” The woman in Elizabeth Bedell’s “The Shawl” mourns her mother, too, as she lives “in the key of grief.” Like a small, spring garden, these pieces. Planted here in celebration of our mothers and sisters.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl 

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We’re in our third 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.

January 2023

From the Editors

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.  —Virginia Woolf

We’re harboring ghosts in Issue 23. The ghost of a dead sister, an alternative life, a lost ambition. We love starting the year with a collection of ekphrastics that make us thrill to being alone in the quiet mystery of what happens next: Terri Brown-Davidson on Hilma af Klint’s “Self Portrait,” in which a mystic yearns to become geometry at its purest; Mark Katrinak on Edward Hopper’s “Hotel Room,” where destinations fail; and DB Jonas on Kafka’s character “Odradek,” who lives, says Jonas, “where the sounds of words call to one another across impossible distances.” We can think of no better line to ring in the New Year than that.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl 

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Join Our Growing Community

We’re in our third 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.

October 2022

From the Editors

Beauty is a defiance of authority. — William Carlos Williams

We’re exploring beauty and loss in Issue 20. Anne Myles pushes hard in “An Origin Story” on the relationship between truth and beauty; when is truth forever ugly, she asks, in a story about loss. “Bloom” is a master class by Elana Wolff on how to weave beauty from a meditation on the details of ordinary life—“We’re all just passing through here,” she says, so let’s not grow weary of gazing at trees. The portrait of “Sarah” from Christina Rauh Fishburne is beautiful, too, and a paean to the loss of what might have been. Each of these three pieces makes loveliness from something broken. Beauty as defiance.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl 

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Join Our Growing Community

We’re in our third 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.

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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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.