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

Brendan Todt

[As part of the latest interdisciplinary proposal]

Brendan Todt

February 2024

Sarah accompanies the botanist who loves most to talk about birds but is paid only to talk about the plants they eat and pollinate, though, the botanist insists, the bird must not ever be seen as separate from the plants it frequents and scatters and seeds. He says the names of things she, too, sees, and he lists the Latin taxonomies, some of which she knows, the origins of some of which she, too, finds interesting.

His voice quiets, briefly, as though there is something innate, essential, about the language of naming, but Sarah has gone down this rabbit hole before. She is, to the best of her knowledge, the only Sarah in her family’s not particularly long, not particularly sad history. Her mother suggested the name after seeing an actress in a movie, and her father approved after seeing the same actress in another. 

The botanist now slows and points to Sarah’s small steps, comparing them to the irregular flapping leap of some large, rare, nearly flightless bird, and when she does not perk at his use of the word metaphor, he asks if he is boring her. She thinks about the dual meaning of the word bore and how lovely and ingenious most human language is, so many words meaning so many things at any one time, and how sad and naïve and ultimately fruitless (unpollinated) the process of taxonomy is, trying to narrow down a thing to one long set of indisputable indicators.

What kind of explication de texte would the botanist write, she wonders, this man who is an authority on some small number of native prairie grasses, which he loves because they are what he calls aboriginal to the land. She wants to but does not ask if he knows the true origin of that phrase—ab original, ab origine: from the beginning, from the creation of the world, unchanged and (therefore) unevolved.

She wants to ask if his love for the aboriginal means secretly that the botanist is no scientist at all, but a man who, like her, believes that some things just are, have always been, may always be. Some things have no other root than what secures them into their dark, dark ground.

Brendan Todt has been published in Pithead Chapel, Necessary Fiction, Reed Magazine, and The Ekphrastic Review, where he was nominated for Best of the Net. His work has appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and he won the 2021 Juxtaprose Poetry prize. Brendan teaches creative writing at Morningside University and coaches the 2014 Boys for Interstate Soccer Club. He lives in Sioux City, Iowa.