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.

Joe Benevento

After Uncle Louie Got Me on Some Nights at the Daily News

by Joe Benevento

April 2022

No cub reporter, instead one cog of a three man crew
walking a serpentine circle around the grimy floor, to the drop

off spots for the giant rolls of unprocessed paper we’d one
precise push to conveyor belt them on their eventual

way to news print. It was union work, but Louie Catapano,
veteran foreman, could call me up whenever they needed

an extra grunt, $10 per hour back when I was making $3
at my day time factory job, so I could never say no thanks,

would just walk twelve blocks back to the A train, taking me
to eight to ten hours of easier money: forty-five minutes off

for every hour and a half we worked, unplanned stops whenever
the machinery wanted to rest, a mini-deli break room

open even at 3 AM, where I’d coffee or snack, though
some of the full-time crew preferred the bar just two

blocks down. One night into almost dawn I wrote
on a pocket-sized yellow pad with a blue Bic pen,

maybe ten love poems for Dorothy Lin, my latest
NYU crush, symbols I’d later copy on cleaner paper

to hand her my suffering, which she later handed back
in the most awkward telephone conversation of our lives, saying

“That was not what I meant at all.” But I could not know
that yet, as I hoped between hard pushes or as I came close

to death, flying home with some co-worker from my part of Queens
who had spent his breaks at the bar, or even as I kept

blowing black soot out of my nose well into Saturday afternoon,
evidence too obvious, I figured, for an actual bad omen.

Joe Benevento’s books include four novels, including The Odd Squad, a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist; three full-length poetry volumes and three poetry chapbooks; a book of short stories; and an edited book of the poetry of Jim Thomas. He is a professor of English at Truman State University and the longtime co-editor of the Green Hills Literary Lantern.