Editor’s Notebook: On Writing Discomfort

December 2023

As we enter the season of contradiction—decked halls and joyful noise limned by dirty ice and a vicious wind—I’m thinking a lot about memory. It’s my current nonfiction project that’s making me go there; the memoir elements of the book demand an awful lot of digging around in my past. Sometimes I have to prove to myself something really did happen the way I think it did. Sometimes I can’t prove it.

I chatted with a few fellow writers this week about the challenge of writing into and through holes in memory. Very soon we were sighing over the contradiction of memoir, that compulsion to tell the truth of a personal story while being wholly unable ever to tell it full, tell it complete. Then we talked about how uncertain memory might prevent us from being fair to our characters, and by characters we mean our mothers and fathers and first loves and broken friends. It is vital that we are fair to those who betrayed us, we said, and we meant it, all the while never doubting the betrayal.

Does all good writing—good art—rest in contradiction? In our best efforts to resolve it?

I miss my short fiction, I told my friends. I miss being the kingmaker, worldbuilder, puppet-master. I don’t like knowing I might be wrong. In fiction there is no wrong. There is poor, of course. There is boring. But despite what the editor might tell you, there is no moral right and wrong in the story you conceived (and if she tells you there is, get another editor). Fiction just works or it doesn’t. I took for granted that single, simple measuring stick.

For now I try to make friends with contradiction. I say when I don’t remember. I try to balance the betrayal with the revelation. It’s December and midwinter is coming. Seems like exactly the right time to summon that still, small voice. The one that tells the truth.

Whatever kind of truth you’re telling in whatever form, stay with it. We’re not getting any younger, writer friends. Every minute counts.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: A postcard from Maine

November 2023

My city, Lewiston, Maine, became known this past week for something horrific. You have surely read about the shootings last Wednesday night. Eighteen people gone, thirteen injured. A terrorized city locked down for 40 hours while law enforcement searched for the gunman. Stay away from windows, texted a friend.

It pains me that this is what you know of my city. It pains me that I had to mention it. I want you to think of something else when you think of Maine. You can think of Stephen King, if you like. You can think of snow, lobsters, blueberries. Ice fishing. Moose. Lighthouses. Or you can take a brief trip back in time with me, to enjoy a Maine snapshot I recently discovered myself.

At the Lewiston Public Library, where I manage inter-library loans, hundreds of books pass through my hands every week, each on its way to someone miles away. Someone waiting impatiently, I always think, and quicken my pace as I sort the day’s requested items. I do take a moment to inspect any older, obviously worn book, in case the binding is broken or pages are torn or stained.

A few weeks ago, as I poked at the binding of an old book of essays about Maine cookery, my love for prose about cooking and food took over, and I couldn’t resist sampling the text. I read a few pages before I forced myself to stop and get back to work. Then I did just that, happy in my knowledge that what I had read would serve as the source of my November Editor’s Notebook.

I was going to say something about voice, I think, because I was so charmed by this blast from the past, a Mainer sharing his father’s recipe for chicken dumplings in 1944. Or maybe I would have talked about the relationship between storytelling and food, something I’ve thought about a lot, because food was the only topic that was safe, in my family. We have a story about my mother’s baked beans, my first restaurant meal, a wheel of super-sharp cheddar it took us weeks to eat in thick wedges we sandwiched between pieces of buttered toast. I have literally said the words, “Tell me the one about the baked potatoes, Dad.”

Probably that’s where I would have landed—food and stories. Instead I will cut myself short so I can make the excerpt longer. I will revel again in the passion a Mainer from eighty years ago brought to his description of cooking and then eating Sunday dinner. Literature without labels. Enjoy this bit of Maine you never would have seen, if you hadn’t come here today:

From Mainstays of Maine, by Robert P. Tristram Coffin, Egged on by Ruth P. Coffin.

We start this dish of ours innocently. We start it as if it were going to be just another chicken fricassee. We cook the dismembered bird in an immense iron kettle, with an innocent little onion or two. But when the bird is nearly done, we do a thing that changes meat into magic. We mix up a pint of sifted flour and a half a teaspoon of salt with just enough water to make the flour pliable. Then we roll the whole mass of it out on the breadboard with a rolling-pin. (My father always used an empty bottle of his favorite, green, Irish whiskey, thinking there was some lingering fragrance of a bygone joy capable of being translated by glass to the dumplings.) We roll the dough out till it is thin as the petals of wild roses and as shrinkingly shy and as alive to the touch. Then we slash this cloth of roses made of sensitive flour into quick strips, and drop the strips one by one into the pot with the chicken. Each thin petal sinks out of sight, each independent and not stuck to its companions. And now down there among the chicken bones and flesh, liver and breast and dark meat, each delicate petal ruminates. Then a miracle happens. Each petal suddenly swells, grows, explodes internally in all its cells, suffers a lovely and strange sea-change. And up the petals come, each after each, to the top of the kettle where the golden “eyes of soup” dusk and shrink and expand. The petals have taken up into their beings all the different taste in the several parts of the chicken, in its skin and marrowbones, and they have added a subtle new taste of their own, part flour, part poetry. And when, fifteen minutes after the dumplings have gone to the top of the kettle, we serve the whole works in the largest family soup-tureen, all the family fight for the dumplings, forgetting the Sabbath, forgetting their manners, forgetting the ties of blood. [xvii – xviii]

That’s just one page of the Forward, folks! I can’t wait to read this book.

May you enter the season of eating with a fraction of the joy Robert P. Tristram Coffin found in his kitchen. And may we all hold close every bit of joy we can, wherever we find it.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: On Miracles

October 2023

We publish small miracles, here at Waterwheel Review. Manifestations of what we crave, help create, and need to share. Three each month of every nine-month season.

Our mission is human connection through art. Art produced and published, we are keenly aware, by plain hard work. That’s why the waterwheel—an engine of labor—is our guiding image, the unbroken circle of the ever-turning wheel moving through water. Lifting and then dropping, and then lifting again, the water always flowing and recombining, both gathering and spreading. Life-giving water.

I said small miracles. How small? How do we even begin to measure their power?

Every piece we present to readers is a blessing of crafted phrases or sentences. But there’s so much more to celebrate than the words; more that is forever unwritten yet contained within a publication’s influence. Each holds the magic that went into the making of it, and then, once it lives, accumulates the resonance of its ripple effects.

Let me be specific. A few examples of the alchemy of human connection in written art:

For a couple of months I struggled to find the right ending to a short story. No more of this absurd flailing, I told myself one night before bed. I read the story straight through, then turned out the light. When I wake up, I’ll know how the story ends. And that is exactly what happened. As I fast-typed the words pouring out of me the next morning, I recognized an image from a conversation with a friend a couple of days before; another from a television show my husband made me watch a few weeks before that; and another from an evening with my sister in my early 20s. Something about my almost-dream-state made me notice some of the life experiences that went into the crafting of that three hundred or so words. Many thanks to my friend, my husband, and my sister.

A woman I know wrote an essay about a dining experience she’d had with a memorable group of people many years ago in a well known NYC restaurant. A friend who read her draft mentioned that she knew someone who had waited tables in that restaurant. A few days later, what do you know—the friend reached out to the former waiter, and just a couple of sentences into the story of the essay, he stopped her. “I remember that group! I WAITED ON THAT TABLE!” What are the odds?? I’m almost salivating as I think of the perspective and detail the former waiter will be able to provide to the author of that essay, adding to its texture and breadth.

Last Thursday afternoon I solved a personal mystery I’ve been wondering about since I was 18 years old. I solved it first through writing about it, second by reading what I wrote to a friend, third by adding more to the text in response to my friend’s feedback. At no point in this process was I actually attempting to solve the mystery, I was just telling a story—a story I have shared with at least a dozen people through the many years since it happened, a story my sister and I have told each other in a hundred different ways, a story that just happens to contain that mystery I couldn’t solve. Until now, by accident, as the solution presented itself while I worked in a couple of additional sentences in response to a question from my friend that, as it happens, had no bearing on it. Surprise!

A few years ago I taught a workshop on very short fiction in a town a couple of hours away. A woman who had lost the love of her life to cancer just a few months before, took the class. The workshop includes time for writing in response to prompts, then sharing the drafts. This woman wrote a perfectly crafted micro so beautiful it brought me to tears. It captured a moment of her partner’s death, so I wasn’t the only one crying. Later she told me this was the first thing she had written about her loss. The piece was published only weeks later without the need to change a single word.

To finish, a Waterwheel Review example: Because our submission process is blind, the cover letter that comes with a submission doesn’t become visible to us until we make a decision to accept or reject. One stunning piece we enthusiastically accepted came with this happy message: The author landed on our website, really liked our vibe, and sat down to write something for us, the very something we were already metaphorically holding to our chest, in a rapture over its beauty. That one miracle alone is enough to reward every drop of energy and work I have put into this magazine.

Last month in this space I was going to share anecdotes about what I and my co-editors did with our summer. Notes about what we wrote in those few months, or stories about writing-related events. As Suzanne reported, we were all hit by urgent, last-minute concerns, so there was only time to wave hello as the season started up, and reaffirm our love for this place. Had I written the planned Editor’s Notebook, I would have confessed that I spent the entire hiatus utterly consumed—to a fault, if I’m honest—by my current nonfiction project. I probably would NOT have said how hard it has been to pull away from that work, just the inch or two required, so I can return to editorial duties. I’m admitting it here to emphasize how much I and my co-editors care about honoring the art and craft of connection through the written word.

It’s not enough to produce my own. To hear, occasionally, about my friends’ writing miracles. I have to foster a community hungry for them. Create more room for them. So when it’s time to report for duty, I put my own work aside and come back to the waterwheel. I’m always glad I did.

In the end that’s what I’m here for—the miracles.

—Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: We Are Who We Are

September 2023

Readers, we considered sharing our “What did you do over summer vacation?” tales as a means to peek behind the curtain: What do magazine editors do when they’re not magazine editing? How and when do they write? Importantly, do they write at all?

We came up with this: &$#! (one of us navigating a medical emergency); %*^@ (one of us taking care of kids who got sick their first week of school); and what-the-actual-f? (one of us unable to send her kids back to school because of mold. MOLD.).

We are three WWR editors excited by and honored to publish stunning writing. Somehow, we hear the writing and associate it with images and sounds. We read music, echo voices, and project ideas. Despite and within our own trials, we continue to celebrate what flows by, no matter its form. But, we’re human—vulnerable and fierce—and because life is life, we must pivot to keep moving forward, like water.

—Suzanne Farrell Smith