Writer’s Notebook: “Alams for Cleaning Out the Painter’s House”

Published May 2021, Issue #9

All three publications in this issue have the look of verse, and the white space surrounding a piece makes more of an impression in that form, typically, than when text is formatted to look like prose. For that reason, and because Kristen Roach’s “Last Responder” draws much of its power from the way it utilizes its white space, we thought a lot about formatting, and the way the eye moves over text, as we put this issue together. All of which demands a word from Charlotte Friedman.

Charlotte published with us last May, a piece also in verse that used unusual text placement to great effect. I asked Charlotte for her thoughts about the way she approached the page when she wrote that piece:

“Alams for Cleaning Out the Painter’s House” was inspired by the discovery of Khaled Mattawa’s alams in Fugitive Atlas (Graywolf 2020). These brief poems, created and chanted by Bedouin poets of eastern Libya and western Egypt, seemed appropriate for the containment and amplification of the narrator’s grief as she cleans out the house of the painter, her father. Each alam may portray an image, a thought, a wish or a memory. As the narrator cleans, her mind leaps from the present to remembered images and experiences. The brevity of alams and their arrangement on the page leaves the reader free to wander in the poem, much as one’s eyes and mind do, when looking at a painting.”

Yes, it does leave the reader free to wander! I love this piece so much because it offers me three ways to read and understand it. On my first encounter, I read top to bottom down the left side, then top to bottom down the right. Immediately after that first reading, I took a second trip, this time reading left to right, each stanza at a time—the top left stanza, followed by the top right stanza, followed by the second-from-the-top left stanza, and so on. Right away I then read the piece a third time, starting with the top line to the left, followed by the top line to the right, followed by the second-from-the-top line to the left, and so on. Each reading was special and intriguing, and I couldn’t decide which way I liked it best. I still can’t.

Thank you, Charlotte, for letting us showcase your work. And congratulations for making the 2022 Best of the Net list of finalists with this piece!

—Claire Guyton

Writer’s Notebook: “Avian Elegies”

Published December 2020, Issue #4

I feel a curious mix of melancholy and hope as I read our current issue and linger on the images and songs chosen as companions. Even the Tibetan singing bowl sounds both sad and joyful. I love this kind of blending of dark and light, because it reminds me to look for beauty and grace in what is hard and painful. More, it reminds me to live deeply my uncrowded, unshaded moments. It reminds me to be grateful. Why, then, does this issue bring to mind so palpably a piece that does not read as a blend of dark and light at all, but is, I would argue, probably our darkest publication?

I just re-read Shannon Bowring’s “Avian Elegies” once again. There isn’t much, if any, light in the storytelling (the Vivaldi, I think, but others might disagree). But yes, for me it captures that same pleasing sadness, that dark pulse of joy that I relish. Read it and tell me if you agree: The light that accompanies the dark comes from the song of the lines, the rhythm of the refrain. The simple (painful) beauty of the images woven throughout the piece, and the music of “Little darling, baby bird.” The accrued meaning of the telling is almost completely dark. But the manner of telling is so lovely that it combines with the one light brushstroke of telling (I’m right, it’s the Vivaldi!) to lift the narrative partly from the shadows by the end. Alchemy.

Shannon isn’t sure herself how she pulled it off. Here’s what she says about it:

When I submitted “Avian Elegies” to Waterwheel Review, I noted in my cover letter that the story had “burst out of me one morning seemingly out of nowhere, and after it was done, I wasn’t quite sure what it was.” Over a year after writing the story, I still don’t really know what this piece is, and that’s what I love most about it. The more I write, the more I believe a story does not need to fall into a specific, easy-to-define genre or category. And the more I write, the more I understand inspiration for a story never comes from one clear source but from a lovely, messy jumble of disparate images, dreams, impressions, and memories. Some of the scenes in “Avian Elegies” are drawn from my own experience (a grandfather’s boat on a distant lake, greedy seagulls in a hospital parking lot), but most of the story (missing sisters and dead birds with rainbow plumage) is part of that jumble. An indefinable mix of grief and love and blood and magic. A little bit like life itself.

I have very fond memories of finding our companion pieces for this publication. If you’ve never seen Audubon’s prints in Birds of America, treat yourself to this video we included in our homepage triptych. Here’s an article we considered using, that includes another great (much shorter) video about a ritual page-turning of one of these books held currently at Bowdoin College in Maine—I love this video so much, but we couldn’t resist the previous one because of the absolute feast of prints included.

And here’s a special offering from our Suzanne Farrell Smith, the WWR team’s sweetest voice. I mean that literally, as you’ll discover if you listen to this personal recording (using just her cell phone), of one of her favorite bedtime lullabies for her boys, “Memorial Song.” As a companion to “Avian Elegies” we used Patti Smith’s version, because its sad-sweet inspiration, the death of Smith’s close friend, seemed like the appropriate context. But we gave Suzanne’s rendition a shot, because we love her voice as accompaniment to this piece that reads so much like a song, and we hankered for that raw immediacy of a personal, unadulterated recording. It wasn’t dark, we realized, and this piece, as I’ve been saying, demanded dark. So we went with Patti, but Cheryl and I dined on Suzanne’s recording for a few days, and I still hold it in my heart. Thank you, Suzanne, for letting me post it here.

Thanks again to Shannon Bowring for letting us showcase her work. Work that, as it happens, was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2021 anthology, out NOW from Sonder Press. Congratulations, Shannon!

—Claire Guyton

Writer’s Notebook: “Sink or Swim”

Published January 2021, Issue #5

Reader, I need you to understand me, because my co-editors do not: The presentation of a Waterwheel Review issue—the text-boxed excerpts from the three new publications, the companion pieces and background images chosen to appear with each, the quote we hang over them all—is available, in all its homepage-scrolling glory, for one single month only.* The publications remain at the site, of course, and we have archives depicting the original homepage triptychs. But that issue’s presentation, and the homepage experience of it? Gone forever. This is painful for me. It’s why I spend so much time on our homepage. I scroll and scroll and scroll and scroll. And scroll. 

For my co-editors this quirk of our publishing model is entirely a source of joy. The coming loss just sweetens the experience of a “live” issue. Yes, sand mandalas. Yes, The Wisdom of Insecurity. I know. I know. Knowing doesn’t erase the strange little pulse of heartache I feel when an issue gets replaced. 

The sense of loss limning the almost giddy bloom of happiness that overtakes me when I get the text—We are live!—can only be soothed in two ways. (1) A marathon of new scrolling, of course. (2) A visit to the Archives page to be reminded of former scrolling-love. I start using that second strategy at least a week before the new issue goes up, and always as my thoughts leap from the new pieces about to be published to the ones that live on our site already, one former publication will jump out and demand new attention. That’s the piece I settle on for a Writer’s Notebook.

Heather Diamond’s “Sink or Swim” is the perfect last-season companion to Issue #12. In our editors’ note, we called this issue a meditation on human connection, which is exactly how I feel about “Sink or Swim.” Here’s a note from Heather on her inspiration for the piece, and the process of pulling it together:

“Sink or Swim” did not start as a triptych lyric essay. It grew from fragments and juxtapositions as well as my background in folklore studies. I wrote the last section first, the part about a children’s dilemma game that I remembered playing with other girls. Working with the details in that scene reminded me of a stalled essay I’d written about teaching in which I had described a similar dilemma I’d used as a classroom exercise. When I juxtaposed those scenes, I realized they shared water settings and were both about deciding whether to save a partner or a child. That was when I connected them to a discarded section from my memoir in which my daughter and I argued about life choices and blood ties. From there, the mother/child theme took over through the extended water metaphor as I considered “how water sings to blood” and the what-ifs and consequences of the choices we make when it comes to love. In the final edits, I rearranged the panels to “sink” backward to childhood and linked the sections by adding the subtitles. In writing as in life, some choices choose us.

In my first two Writer’s Notebooks, I included notes on companion pieces we considered but didn’t select for the publication I spotlighted. I won’t do that here because I have to use this opportunity instead to get more eyes on my favorite companions in Season One, a video (see below) that still makes me gasp, and a painting (see above) by Sandra York, a friend of Heather, that captures perfectly the feeling of “Sink or Swim.” Enjoy!

Magical ice-skating video from northern Finland wows viewers

All my thanks to Heather Diamond for helping to soothe this month’s heartache, while adding another layer to the thrill of new work. 

–Claire Guyton

*Excepting the May issue—that one was up through our summer hiatus (and I very much enjoyed all the extra scrolling).

Writer’s Notebook: “The Shut-In”

Published March 2021, Issue #7

For a while I thought Maine might avoid the Delta-variant-driven spike in Covid cases. These past couple of weeks I’ve accepted that last year’s postponed Thanksgiving visit from my sister and her husband will be postponed once again. In a fit of disappointment over this, I asked my husband how many introverts like us might morph into shut-ins because of this pandemic. That term—“shut-in”—isn’t one I’ve heard or used much. It came to mind, I’m sure, because of Erica Kent’s piece we published this past March. And I’m so pleased it did, because it led me away from my frustration and brought me back to her good work.

I asked Erica about her inspiration for the piece:

“The Shut-In” is based on a true story. My parents moved into the shut-in’s home “sight unseen” in the summer of ’68, about nine months before I was born. As my dad was pretty acerbic, it proved easy to imagine his comments as he and my mom went from room to room unearthing treasures of their starter home. The story became part of our family folklore, or what was our family until my parents got divorced in 1983. A couple of years ago, when I set about writing the piece, I mined my mother for details. I wanted to call my dad too, but as he had recently died, I made do with what I envisioned he would’ve remembered. I tried to stay faithful to my parent’s personal history, as well as the character of the shut-in. In a few places I gave myself creative license, and, as such, technically the piece is fiction. My favorite part, the ball of hair, is true. It was the starting point.

When Covid hit and the country went into lockdown, the implications of the piece expanded. A revised story might very well include playing with time, creating more of a back and forth examination of what it means to be tucked away from daily life. But for now, after many drafts, I am satisfied with the scope of this version.