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.

Ron Riekki

“idiopathic” (my life has been the medieval military exercise of tilting at a quintain)

by Ron Riekki

January 2022

I shake. I constantly shake. My feet shake
and hands shake even when I’m not doing
a handshake and my teeth shake and jaw
shakes and my fingers shake when I’m
holding a milkshake and when I’m not

holding a milkshake and when my girl-
friend Huilin holds me I ask her if she
feels me shaking and she says no, but
I feel my feelings shake and my thoughts
shake and my stillness shake and I grew

up in a mining town where they’d set off
dynamite every noon and the room would
shake and the ceiling had cracks and near-
by the railroad would have railroad cars
go by and the roof would shake and during

the war our lives shook the trees shook
the night shook the dozen people killed
at the bases I was on are in graves now
so still in their graves now so still and
this poem here is so still and if you let

in my memories you will shake so stop
reading this poem and move on to another
page before the trembling transfers from
the leaves outside of your home in
the coming winter night to your body.

Ron Riekki’s books include My Ancestors Are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press). His poetry appears in Rattle, Poetry Northwest; fiction in Threepenny Review, Bellevue Literary Review; and nonfiction in River Teeth, New Orleans Review, and more. He has edited eight books, including Here and The Way North.