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.

March 2023

From the Editors

Time is how you spend your love. —Nick Laird

Often we move too fast to think about how we’re spending our time. So we make ourselves slow down. And we discover how much time we spend in love. With family, friends, the call to write. In love with this, our magazine. Issue #25 puts us into the home stretch of our third year, here at Waterwheel Review. We slow down to savor Caroline Simpson’s ode to aging male mentors, teachers, and fathers, “Old Men Love Me.” Then we sink into Sara Ries Dziekonski’s homage to grandmothers, diners, and good waitressing, “How Simple Steps Become a Dance.” And finally we allow ourselves to be led by Marie Antoinette, in Elizabeth Sylvia’s “Ars Antoinettica,” into a meditation on lucky accidents of birth—another reminder that we are three of the most fortunate women alive, every day doing work we love.

—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.

February 2023

From the Editors

That’s all we have, finally. The words, and they had better be the right ones. —Raymond Carver

How many people live inside stories / that never come true asks Richard Jackson in the final of his three “Understories,” a word that could serve as a title for Issue 24. Kalani Padilla’s “Translator’s Note” hints at the stories we might find if we dig into the layers built into words. In “Sight-Paths,” Hoyt Rogers reminds us that in truth there is just one story containing everything, and in that grand narrative, the pilot of a helicopter is much the same as a frigate bird or a buzzard hunched in a tree. To make artful sense of it all, we have to get the words just right. And we do.

—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.

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.