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

Christina Hutchins

Traveling through the Vanishing Point

by Christina Hutchins

December 2021 (reprinted January 2024)

Driving alone across the country, I never
once got sleepy, oh, once, only an hour
after leaving home, thinking aloud, This
will be a hard trip, but the car was home
to an alertness ever forming.

On the road, stopping whenever I wanted to,
going exactly ten miles over the speed
limit, eschewing cruise control, wanting
my foot subtly playing the accelerator,
I went ninety in western Utah,

not a single other vehicle for a hundred
miles. It was a pearly Sunday morning, & I suppose
most people in Utah, standing still in shafts
of light, were singing hymns of life everlasting,
facing the same morning I faced.

Just salt flats & two pencil lines
drawn parallel into the vanishing point,
I was so happy, wheels shaping
the sound of paving into a rush of water
under me. Time & existence widened.

Maybe my knowledge of love began in the car
while I stood behind my father, reading his mind.
I was small enough to stand tall on the floor
behind the front seat, my head near his,
holding onto the curve of the seat,

its plastic upholstery under my fingers. & maybe
more than I allow myself to know, what I need
of love’s presence finds itself already behind time
& death, & maybe the hymns do sing lasting
life abundant. Seatbelts, car seats, head rest

no one had them yet. So I rode on both feet,
watching the road shape itself as we went,
& listening to my father’s silent thoughts,
his worries about money, broken things,
the car needing repairs. What about

the car, Daddy? What are we going to do
about the car? I asked aloud, his worry
my fear, a kind of fire ripping through my chest,
child’s desperation, & something else, too,
new-forming, some compassion, life was

that hard, & my poor father bore it,
& still more, my father lived that hardness for me.
My need existed. Therefore, I existed.
He drove, & his need was for me, no, his need
was for my knowing a home to my need.

The realm of love can be everlasting.
I sped through the Utah morning, & the road
finally curved ahead. I stood behind him.
We proceeded together, & even now the road
surrenders itself under our passage.

Christina Hutchins’s Tender the Maker won the May Swenson Award, and The Stranger Dissolves was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. Her poems appear in Beloit Poetry Journal, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, The Southern Review, and Women’s Review of Books. Awards include The Missouri Review Prize and the Dartmouth Poet in Residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, NH.