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.

Terri Brown-Davidson

Self Portrait

by Terri Brown-Davidson

January 2023

Where do ghosts go
When they peregrinate
Off the astral plane?
I saw my sister during one séance in a gray
Astral haze. Her hair seemed limned
With an idea of yellow hair, little thready
Wisps. She was
Miniscule to begin with, had shrunk to the
Scant three ounces the spirit is reputed
To weigh. After the séance, I put my hair
Up in a coiffed architectural mess
To remind myself that I still lived inside
My skin. O wholeness
Of me in the flesh, invisible blood fueling me
Up toward the masters, who can observe me
More clearly than any human being might,
Hilma-Me swimming in the brilliant red blood
That I never designed. What I want is to be
Reborn as a crescent, a cube, a rectangle,
A sentient object, geometry at its purest:
Unbodied.

FOOTNOTE: Hilma af Klint changed our understanding of art history when it was discovered that she—not Kandinsky nor Mondrian, as previously believed—“invented” abstractionism in art. Profoundly affected by the death of her ten-year-old sister, af Klint investigated the spiritual practices that were prevalent in her time, and became part of a group called “The Five” that was interested in automatic writing and forms of communicating with the dead. A mystic, af Klint believed she spoke to spirits she dubbed the “High Masters” during séances and trance states, and the masters guided her to produce her paintings. She is the subject of a current film called Hilma, starring Lena Olin.

Terri Brown-Davidson’s first book of poetry, The Carrington Monologues, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her first novel, Marie, Marie: Hold on Tight, was published to excellent reviews, and she was interviewed about the novel in The Writer. Her poetry, fiction, and essays have appeared in hundreds of journals as well as in the anthology Triquarterly New Writers. She was awarded a Yaddo fellowship, a New Mexico Fiction Writers Fellowship, and the AWP Intro Award in Poetry.