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

Madeleine Mysko

Dream Babies

by Madeleine Mysko

November 2021

“You were a beautiful baby,” my mother once said, “but to tell the truth, I just couldn’t wait until you were old enough to talk.”

Anyone who knew my mother (she is gone now) will see the humor in this. The predominant trait on my mother’s side of the family is the desire to talk. Those in the family who likewise exhibit this trait are forever vying for that pause in the conversation into which they can jump and take the floor. My mother was a natural storyteller. The child of a natural storyteller, I grew up telling stories too, and writing them down.

When I was the mother of small children, I read an essay by Raymond Carver, a sad little piece about how hard it was for him, as the father of small children, to get any writing done. I instantly developed a crush on him, because I was feeling sorry for myself too. Eventually the crush faded. I’ve lived a lot longer now than Carver did. Meanwhile, my children have grown up to be as fiercely protective of their mother’s creative space as they are of their own.

Once I wrote some poems about a recurrent dream in which I discover a baby in an unexpected place: up in the attic, down in the basement by the washing machine, on the ashy grate of the cold fireplace. I don’t actually recognize this baby. At the same time I know this baby is mine, and I’m terrified because I’ve forgotten to feed the poor thing. This baby just looks at me with wide-open eyes, the gaze seeming old and wise somehow, and maybe even forgiving. I named the poems “Dream Babies.”

Around this time I went to visit my youngest child, the daughter who’d moved to New York and taken several part-time jobs so that she could paint when she wasn’t working. Because my youngest child was not born with her grandmother’s desire to talk, she had told me only that her new apartment was small and the canvases were big.

I took the train. As it rolled out of Baltimore, I gazed into the backyards of all those little row houses beyond the tracks. I was feeling a little blue. I’d recently let go of a house full of memories, the very house in which I’d raised the daughter I was off to visit.

At the train station, she strode forward from the crowd to take charge of me. She led me into the subway and out, down 14th Street, up the elevator to the apartment.

“Prepare yourself,” she said, unlocking the door.

“Oh, it can’t be that big a mess,” I said, though I hadn’t forgotten her childhood bedroom, the smell of turpentine, her fingerprints in bright colors on the furniture and the walls.

“The paintings, I mean,” she said. “They’re really big.”

And there they were, really big: paintings of babies with wide-open eyes, the gaze seeming somehow old and wise, and maybe even forgiving.

“Dream Babies,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Did I ever show you my Dream Baby poems?”

She was looking at the nearest Baby, who was sitting against a field of blues. “You dream about them too?”

I was too surprised to even talk.

We stood side by side, studying her babies for a while. And then she carried my bag to her bedroom, where I would sleep beside her that night, beneath a comforter that smelled of turpentine and paint.

Madeleine Mysko is the author of a poetry collection, Crucial Blue, and two novels, Bringing Vincent Home and Stone Harbor Bound. She is also a registered nurse, and coordinates the “Reflections” column for American Journal of Nursing. Presently she teaches writing at Goucher College.