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

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Our Story

We first came together as a team in 2012, when we co-created the essay series “7 Deadly Sins of the Writing Life” at Hunger Mountain, the literary journal published by the low-residency MFA program we all attended at Vermont College of Fine Arts. The writing community the three of us formed around that project has sustained our writing lives ever since, and gave birth to Waterwheel Review in 2020. To celebrate our 10th anniversary, we’re re-publishing the essays in the final 7 months of our third season of Waterwheel Review, each on the first day of the month to coincide with a new issue, from November 2022, through May 2023. You’ll find them at our new site, 7sinswriting.com.

November 1, 2022

Editors

claire guyton headshot

Claire Guyton is a southern transplant to Lewiston, Maine, where she works at the city’s library, and lives in a pumpkin-colored house with her husband and two queenly sister-cats. In her more active, pre-pandemic life, she co-organized the Local Writers Read series at the local bookstore, and taught a workshop in very short fiction for the Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance. Claire has been a Maine Arts Commission Literary Fellow and a finalist for the Maine Literary Award, and her work has been selected for the Best Small Fictions anthology and nominated for a Pushcart. Her short fiction appears in Crazyhorse, Mid-American Review, Vestal Review, River Styx, Sliver of Stone Magazine, and many other journals, as well as in the Maine anthology Summer Stories. After earning an MFA in fiction at Vermont College of Fine Arts, she served for several years as an editor and writing life blogger for the program’s journal, Hunger Mountain. Claire recently reclaimed her writing life from Covid’s shadow, and spends almost all of her free time researching and drafting material that will either develop into a memoir or feed her next round of fiction. www.claireguyton.com

suzanne farrell smith headshot

Suzanne Farrell Smith is the author of The Memory Sessions, a memoir about her search for lost childhood memory; and The Writing Shop, a guidebook for writing teachers. Her essay collection, Small Off Things: Pieces of an Anxious Mind, is forthcoming from Littoral Books. She is widely published, has been named Notable in Best American, and won a Pushcart for her essay “If You Find a Mouse on a Glue Trap,” published in Brevity. She teaches writing at Westport Writers’ Workshop, mentors emerging authors, and reads for Longridge Review. She lives in a creek-cut valley in Connecticut with her husband and three sons. www.suzannefarrellsmith.com

cheryl wilder smiling outside closeup

Cheryl Wilder’s collection, Anything That Happens, a Tom Lombardo Poetry Selection (Press 53, 2021), was named Second Finalist in the 2022 Poetry Society of Virginia North American Book Award and received Honorable Mention in the 2022 Brockman-Campbell Book Award. Her chapbook What Binds Us (Finishing Line Press) was published in 2017. Cheryl’s forthcoming collection (Press 53, 2024) is being supported by the North Carolina Arts Council Artist Support Grant. Her work appears in the anthology Crossing the Rift: North Carolina Poets on 9/11 & Its Aftermath, Barely South Review, and Architects + Artisans, among other publications. In 2018, she served as writer-in-residence at SistaWRITE; and in 2019, she was granted residency at Sundress Academy for the Arts. She earned her BFA from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington and her MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Cheryl lives near the Haw River in North Carolina, where she gives talks and workshops, serves as president of the Burlington Writers Club, and owns a coaching business. She’s a mother of three boys and the wife of one grateful man. www.bornwilder.com