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

By

Editor’s Note Issue #1

September 2020

Editor’s Note

claire guyton headshot

I feel reckless.

On January 17, and seven years after our first conversation about starting a literary magazine, I emailed my friends Cheryl Wilder and Suzanne Farrell Smith with this question: Waterwheel Review. Where are we?

After years of stopping and starting, and at least two target launch dates scheduled and then allowed to pass, I was ready to hit go. Or… just go. Maybe we could never make room in our lives for this particular labor of love.

List-maker, double-bagger, belt-and-braces Suzanne stunned me with her reply: I feel reckless. Then Cheryl: Fuck it.

We couldn’t have guessed then or by February 29 when our sample issue went live, that by mid-March Cheryl and Suzanne would be homeschooling their children, and I would be working an improvised version of my library job at home. Or that time would feel so vast and slow yet leave so little space—outside the new hygiene and safety protocols, the learning curve required for transporting all human interaction to Zoom, the absorption of information on case numbers and symptoms and methods of transmission—for any labors of love.

If we had known what was coming, we wouldn’t have allowed ourselves to be reckless. Waterwheel Review would still be a project-in-waiting, or, possibly, a project abandoned. And I wouldn’t be thinking about how the three publications in our first issue form, for me, a grand, deeply rich meditation on the passage of time, the lifeline or leash of love, our need to transmute fleeting human experience into art. I wouldn’t marvel at how all three play with surreal narration—Christina in a voice effortlessly moving back and forth through space and time; Jefferson in the simple, modern language of his nonplussed protagonist; and Sofia using the lavish imagery of a fable.

If we had known what was coming, I wouldn’t have enjoyed the thrill of recognition when I first read “Three Women Writing Around My Head”—submitted blind, per our guidelines—and knew the author had to be fellow Mainer Jefferson Navicky. “I will not be voting on this one,” I said, recusing myself without explanation, and sat in silence while my co-editors discussed whether we would accept a piece I wanted so badly (I didn’t suffer long). I wouldn’t now savor this extra spoonful of sweetness in publishing a friend, nor could I extend the treat with a Q&A about his connection to Maine’s robust history of women writers.

If we had known what was coming, “Until the Charm Fades,” the music Charlie Rauh wrote to serve as a companion to his sister Christina’s publication, wouldn’t exist. But we didn’t know. And here we are, reveling in all this art we get to showcase, celebrating this new small community of makers, and glorying in literature without labels.

I have no children to homeschool, so it’s easy for me to say it: I’m glad—so very, very grateful—that we didn’t delay our launch once again. Right now in the time of face masks and hand sanitizer and curbside pickup? I need exactly this kind of reckless.

Claire Guyton

By

Who made it? Issue #1

Who made it?

September 2020 | Issue #1

With “Forgive the Form” by Christina Rauh Fishburne

Sculpture from Margot Robinson’s Mystical Dreamer collection. 
“Until the Charm Fades” written and performed by Charlie Rauh in response to his sister’s piece.

With “Three Women Writing Around My Head” by Jefferson Navicky 

abstract painting with two stick people jumping pillar to pillar under the sun
Background image from Parkour in Purgatory in acrylic, enamel, marker, by Deb Farrell.

With “We Have Always Been Who We Are” by Sofia T. Romero

looking up the trunk and through the canopy of a weeping birch tree
A weeping beech at the DeCordova Museum in Massachusetts by author Sofia T. Romero.

close up of large tree trunk with carved initials
Background image of a weeping beech at the DeCordova Museum in Massachusetts by author Sofia T. Romero.

Acknowledgments

Streams of water background photo by BillionPhotos from Bigstock.

For the collage of women writers Kate Barnes, Sarah Orne Jewett, Ruth Moore, and photo of Moore’s typewriter, photos courtesy of the Maine Women Writers Collection at University of New England.

Hall of mirrors photo from Amazing Mirror Maze.