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.

Suzanne Farrell Smith

Only Now

by Suzanne Farrell Smith

February 2020 | Originally published by River Teeth (October 2016)

Only now, as you stand center of an aisle carpeted royal blue, where you and your older sisters, styled by mother in hand-sewn dresses to match her own, once trailed like ducks down the narrow river, bearing Communion on days Mass was dedicated to your dead father;

Only now, while the oldest, behind you, corrals her children, and the second stands to the side and bends whispering to hers, and the third clutches your elbow;

Only now, while your three diapered babies remain in the hall gated by guild ladies;

Only now, after you kept your mother on ice as many days as nature and custom allowed, ordered the organist and conducted the cantor, debated readings with presiding priests, chose the Bible edition, solicited pallbearers, moved a cousin to the left so he could lift with a good arm, shifted the strongest to the front;

Only now, head and shoulders above-coffin, do you look forward and see nothing of your mother’s patchwork skirt that once shielded you, smallest mouse in a big house;

Only now do you sense your body’s surface exposed, your face a trigger for congregants wondering when to weep;

Only now, fourth of four, first in line for the first time, only now do you swallow your generation.

Let your black cardigan slip, irreverent, from your shoulders, and walk, eyes fixed on the deacon’s wife’s hat.

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 work appears in Creative Nonfiction, Brevity, Hippocampus, and numerous other journals and anthologies; has been named Notable in Best American Essays and Special Mention in Pushcart Prize; and won a Pushcart in 2019.