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

Heather McClelland

Prognosis: Blue

by Heather McClelland

September 2021

The film is heavy. While moved into a neat stack, it sounds like sheet metal. Before they were moved to computer files, all MRI images appeared on large sheets of film that doctors forced into slots to hang in front of a bright white light. It is a swift, impatient gesture.

The doctor explains this landscape of dark and white pools using words that turn in on themselves. What he points to I cannot see. Let’s try it this way, then, he says.

No. Let’s try it this way.

The eyes appear as empty sockets. Optic nerves extend like tributaries from these two bright lakes. The mass network of the brain, a dark shine of a brown so dark it is almost black. An image of nothing, it seems. At first.

Peel back the layers of film and the lesions appear. They are T2 shine-through. T2 star. Decayed lesions, no longer active, but bright. Scars. Stars.

This one page, however, clearly shows the optic nerve with its new bright light, its myelin sheath gone. Light pours in unfiltered. The pupil receiving no information to constrict, lets it all into the depths of the brain. The iris, its dark browns laced with moss green, streams of yellow, stands by. A beautiful distraction, foliage at the entrance to a dark cave, the dark cave blown out the other side. No one can see this. I would never know you had a problem, is often said.

While one pupil stays open; the other adjusts.

I begin to understand that I cannot see red, but blue holds. I keep this to myself, that blue is the last to disappear. Blue holds while I walk away. And where I find you, your hands rise and fall. You sit and you talk, and with one eye I see you in all of your colors, the iridescent red sliding through your dark hair, the bright orange of your scarf, the mole-scape of your arms. You vibrate with color. With the other eye, I see a spectre dancing, I see the places you shine while the blue of the sky contains you, and the blue of your eyes lets me in.

Blue is a prognosis, a guess, a place to dive into. I do not tell the doctor this.

Heather McClelland is writing a novel set in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin, a poetry collection, and investigations of disability in creative writing (content and structure). Her work appears in Willow Review and is forthcoming in Prime Number Magazine (awarded runner-up 2021 Award for Poetry). She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and serves on the board of the Stories Matter Foundation.