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

Kate Senecal

Nina Simone

by Kate Senecal

November 2021

Nina Simone is a gray pitbull, just barely three they say. My sixteen-year-old daughter, Claire, who is three months home from her first stint in rehab, and two years away from a night when her heart will stop for five minutes and thirty-two seconds, demands that she leave the shelter with us, that we name her after her dead mother’s heroine. I say yes because I’m just a father. I need some kind of help. Much of this must be my fault.

Nina Simone is cute—an arrangement of soft wrinkles, soft devotion, and need. Felt-like and warm, she’s an emblem of stormy vulnerability, reminiscent of a pile of artful rocks. Claire loves her more than me. This is fine because when Claire slumps over in her chair, when her lips bloom blue, she gets saved because Nina insists on it—barks until someone gets the Narcan.

Nina Simone won’t swim, but will prance in the water. She smiles in her sleep, sighs like a human. I ask her every day, “Is she OK?” She huffs at me, and while I can’t be sure, I take this to mean yes, yes Claire is OK. The problem with Claire is, has always been, that her empathy meter is dialed to something like ten thousand. Her other problem is that mine is not.

After her second time in rehab, because there’s no more heroin but there is Suboxone, Claire gets and keeps a job at a clothing store, does yoga. Claire gets new, sober friends and a round body with no edges; becomes an emblem of stormy vulnerability, a pile of artful rocks. Then there are long days, months, years of just me and Nina Simone while Claire is on dates, while Claire is twenty-one and always working. Then she’s twenty-five with her own apartment.

Now Nina Simone’s fourteen, too old for a new home. Claire’s talking about wanting to “be clean, like for real clean.” Nina Simone sleeps with me, felty head under my armpit; walks the woods with me, wades in water—no prancing but no less glory. Old and happy, she’s winding down. I ask everyone “How will I know it’s time?” and they say what’s most unhelpful, what’s most true: “You’ll just know.”

Claire and I make a plan for weaning off the Suboxone, and because she’s now a business owner, for weeks she doesn’t visit. Nina Simone pines, sleeps more, is waning. The last day of Suboxone, Claire comes home. Nina does one prance in the stream, runs a lap in the yard, and she and Claire lie on the rug, heads, paws touching for hours or minutes—a long time. At dusk, Claire’s gone home. It’s pink outside, and through the window I watch Nina Simone flop in the grass, a pile of artful rocks. She sighs and is gone with the sun.

Kate Senecal has been an editor or teacher for Storychord, Writers for Recovery, Grub Street, and UMass Amherst, and is the Assistant Director of Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop. She received an honorable mention from Glimmer Train in 2019, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her fiction has appeared at The Laurel Review, The Foundling Review, and Storychord.com. She holds an MFA from VCFA.