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

Erica Kent

The Shut-In

by Erica Kent

March 2021

My newlywed mother and father’s starter home came dirt cheap but not without two conditions; it had to be sold “sight unseen.” Nor were they allowed to meet the owner, a shut-in. On moving day they opened the front door to a pungent stench. Layers of curtains blocked out windows yellowed with grime. Dishes fuzzy with mold perched everywhere. Squirrels had overtaken the oven. Left behind on an end table in the living room were glasses and a Bible, as if the shut-in had been interrupted minutes earlier from holy reading and taken her cue to vanish. 

From a bedroom closet, my father pulled out a ball of hair the size of a baby’s head—gold and brown strands wrapped in an endless globe. My mother and father laughed and laughed, perhaps not just at the head of hair, but the absurdity of their situation, how after a few months they’d wed, almost strangers, both unaware of what united them: the marble of a baby inside my mother. A whole little world of blood and fiber, as yet hairless. 

Still laughing, they took up questions, trying to top the other: did the shut-in birth her head of hair as is? Or did she go around picking up cobwebs of strands, making the baby head piece by piece? If so, the head must have grown slowly, requiring the great patience of an artist. Still, the shut-in left her masterpiece behind. Wasn’t it precious enough to bring with her? Or perhaps it served as a parting message to the young couple. Here you go. This is your responsibility now.

Fifty years later, I’m that marble baby grown with my own shut-in tendencies and dirty house. I wonder about the shut-in and her head of hair. Bald or not bald, wherever she resettled, she must have felt exposed without the protection of a house she probably didn’t even consider dirty. It had all made sense to her, the squirrels and squalor, the Jesus of her Bible, all part of her private, one woman show. Did she miss the head of hair, grieve over that part of herself now gone? Or maybe its absence meant freedom, to start over with silver and gray strands, a version better suited for old age. My hair like her hair, silver, pale in sunlight. Only I do not gather it. 

The shut-in’s long departed, the newlyweds long separated. I want to know what happened to the ball of hair but my father’s gone. My mother remembers only that there was a ball. She guesses they threw it out. Long disintegrated, it remains sight unseen, alive only in memory, not growing but not shrinking, strands of a world left behind in a dirty house made clean by the hands of strangers. 

Erica Kent lives in Portland, Maine, with her family and chunky dogs. She’s a devoted but irreverent high school English teacher and tutor. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been published in StoryQuarterly, The Brooklyn Rail, Past Ten, Apple in the Dark, and The Maine Review.