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

Brooke Middlebrook

Philosophy of the Dance

by Brooke Middlebrook

October 2021

I ask The Ballerinas to watch my form. Am I doing it?

The Ballerinas scintillate. Not really, they reply, one must use reason to become an exemplar of measured forces, symmetries, order and studied illusions. One must live, completely at ease, in an element comparable to fire. We excel in immanence.

My toes refuse to fully uncurl after class, blistered and cashew-like. I ask The Ballerinas if I’ll ever be able to wear sandals in summer.

They flick the ash from their cigarettes. We confess that while we once concerned ourselves with such tedium, we find being a closed circle of resonance that creates its own space-time is a fair trade.

This time I try to impress The Ballerinas by walking en pointe in my pink Pavlovas. Despite feeling that all of my stretched ligaments will snap and unravel, they do not arc enough above the shoe’s throat to carve out balance. Different shoes would help, I think. All the best girls in class wear Contemporas, slippers the color of apricots that ripple them across the floor. I ask The Ballerinas if I should switch.

The Ballerinas open and shut swiftly. In this dream of vigilance and tension we know only of tearing oneself from one’s proper shape. They are parabolae; they are a diminished seventh resolving to a perfect fifth. And anyway we’ve enclosed ourselves in a singular species of time of our own engendering, consisting entirely of immediate ener-

Not listening, I’ve sat on the floor again. The clump of lambswool in my toe box has become uncomfortable and needs rearranging. Each toe wears a little square of moleskin to lessen the blisters; I spend a good amount of time in the dressing room before class carefully cutting each piece, not thinking of the imminent shearing of tarsal against metatarsal, and leaving behind piles of white paper backings. I want to ask The Ballerinas if they recognize this is pretense.

The Ballerinas bourrée irritably. This One wishes to play at being All. They are the roundness of water rushing from a brass faucet into cupped hands.

I press my foot into the floor. I explain to The Ballerinas that I’m continually vandalized by a surfeit of sensation, impressions and memories that have collected and grown and pushed, insinuated themselves with no other place to go, that hauling around this brocade of meat is not enough to refine all of it into the seamlessness of metaphor.

The body, where is it to put itself?

Text for The Ballerinas is taken from “Philosophy of the Dance,” Paul Valéry, Salmagundi, Spring-Summer 1976, No. 33/34, pp. 65-75; and “Dance and the Soul,” Paul Valéry, from Dialogues, translated by William McCausland Stewart, 1956, Bollingen Series XLV-4, Pantheon Books, pp. 27-62.

Brooke Middlebrook currently resides in Birmingham, Alabama, but grew up in the hills of western Massachusetts. Recent work appears in X-R-A-Y, Tiny Molecules, and Unbroken. She can be found at bmiddleb.com.