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.

April 1, 2022 By Suzanne Farrell Smith

From the Editors | Issue # 17

April 2022

From the Editors

Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words
and everything in the world understands it. —Frances Hodgson Burnett

closeup of three women in separate Zoom screenshots

That was not what I meant at all—this line marks the end of the budding romance in “After Uncle Louie Got Me on Some Nights at the Daily News” by Joe Benevento, a piece about laboring in the act of meaning-making, both in a newspaper’s printing press and with a Bic pen on a pad of paper. “A Brother Is” to love, says Nancy Huggett, but also to lead you down paths of loving that have no answer for disconnection. Her exquisite paean to a sister’s love somehow finds the words. Of birdsong and squawking and chattering “feathery discourse,” Jeff Schiff asks in “Bird Say,” Has to be meaning in it / right? We think there is meaning in it, yes, and Jeff made still more. There are so many beautiful things we understand without words. And then there is so much beautiful art that exists only because we can name things.

—Claire, Suzanne, Cheryl

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