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.

December 1, 2023 By Claire Guyton

Editor’s Notebook: On Writing Discomfort

Editor’s Notebook: On Writing Discomfort

December 2023

looking up at large white christmas lights wrapped around a large oak tree trunk. the lights in the foreground are clear and the background are blurry

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