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.

Susan Wadds

Mostly Sorry

by Susan Wadds

May 2023

It wasn’t the first time. He’d known about the others but chose to climb the stairs, bring wine, and sometimes a record to play while they made love. He was partial to blues while she was more of a folkie, but the blues was good with sex. Fewer words. Maybe he heard the high and low notes of post-coital laughter sloshing with the bathwater, since the bathroom wall met the hallway wall, which is where he stood holding a bottle of single malt. Knocking anyway. She might have thought it was Marianne which would explain why she was still laughing when she opened the door. She was as sorry as she was dripping, the towel gripped over her breast. What neither of them fully understood was why that time—him on one side of the threshold, face like wax; her on the inside, mostly naked, mostly sorry and no longer laughing—wasn’t the last time. He stepped back, the river lap of bathwater splashing in his ears, a man he couldn’t see rising from the cooling water. Unable to pull close the retreating tide of her, he carried the precious single malt down the stairs and out into the street. He could have emptied the bottle directly into his heart. She wasn’t calling him back and there was no reason to return. And yet. He’d written in her diary, a passage she discovered much later, that if she heard a sound behind her, a sound like stones, and if she turned quickly enough she would find some torn-out part of him. What he doesn’t know forty years on is how often she’s passed by his house. How often she plays the blues. How many poems she’s written. Or how her dreams resound with stones rolling in the tide.

Author of What the Living Do, Susan Wadds’ publication credits include pieces in The Blood Pudding, Room, carte blanche, and Azure Magazine. She is the winner of the Lazuli Literary Group’s and The Writers’ Union of Canada’s prose contests. Susan is a graduate of the Humber School for Writers and a certified Amherst Writers and Artists (AWA) writing workshop facilitator.