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 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 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’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