Water~Stone Farewell from Managing Editor Jenn Sisko

It is with many emotions that I reach the end of my time at Water~Stone Review. While I look forward to the future, I will always hold a fond spot in my literary heart for the journal that taught me so much. My journey started with one question: What can I learn, and opened the door to many more.

I started with Water~Stone during the second half of Volume 25, “How Quiet Burns” after picking up from the wonderful previous Managing Editor, Robyn Earhart. There’s something humbling about working on the literary legacy of Water~Stone; the knowledge that dozens of people have come before you and crafted this, and dozens more will come after you. And we are but a small piece in this work and in this world.

I’m grateful to have had dozens of deeply heartfelt conversations with so many of our authors. While the ME is responsible for various tasks in relation to the journal, I was drawn to the intricacy and intimacy of the interviews. My very first interview was with later Contributing Poetry Editor Jose Hernandez Diaz about his piece “Ni de aquí, ni de allá: ni de la pinche luna.” He very generously answered my new-interviewer questions, which helped me to become a little braver and dig a little deeper in my future asks. To those of you who have taken, sometimes hours, out of your writing schedule and daily life to give readers a better insight into your work and thought process, thank you. I am someone who does not know much about poetry, and yet I learned about it by questioning all you poets. I am someone who does not write nonfiction, but I’ve learned to appreciate it through the lens of you who do. And to the fiction writers, you kept me on my toes with your imaginative works. It feels like I’m reading mini masterclasses when I go through interviews, learning tips on how I can improve or think about my writing. Through analyzing contributor pieces and asking authors about their work, I’ve come to question my own writing: “Why am I doing that? What is it that makes me want to use that phrase instead of another? Why not this way?”

In my younger years, I carried the strict idea of authorship as one person writing their own book. That idea of creating something that I made all by myself was very exciting. In this way, an author held all the answers. But as I’ve come to realize, even a single author does not create their full work alone; there’s the layout designer, the cover artist, the editors, the publishers, the first readers, and many more skilled people working on the text. Water~Stone is inherently a place where dozens and dozens of people come together to build the end product; the readers, the genre editors, the contributing editors, the copy editor and layout team… over the last 28 issues, there have been hundreds of people working on Water~Stone—a true legacy. There’s a beauty in a collaborative work like this, and that in itself was a thrilling understanding.

Despite this collaborative effort, none of this would be possible without the incomparable Meghan Maloney-Vinz. So much of her energy and love are infused into these pages. While I had dipped my toes into online publishing before coming on board, physically publishing a book was new to me when I joined the Water~Stone team. She was able to take me through the steps of what it took to create this artifact; the discussions with the art director and copywriter, the detailed and thoughtful ordering of all the pieces; the final proofreading. She carries so much of the work that goes into the process of creating a shared literary experience, weaving this all together behind the scenes. One of the steps that she taught me, and one I found surprisingly delightful, was determining the order of the pieces. This happens after Meghan and I read through the whole of the work, in whatever order it starts in, and afterwards we sit down to decide what piece goes where. It’s incredible how often we’ll get thematic groupings that just… fit, clusters of authorial ideas congregating around similar themes. It’s such a privilege to see how people think, and how our similar thoughts can come in such a wide array of literature.

As my time at Water~Stone comes to an end, I want to thank everyone who I’ve had the opportunity of working with on this journal for everything they’ve taught me. For those who are working on their own writing, my suggestion is this: find a team and become insatiably curious about their writing. Think of feedback as interviews, rather than critiques. Encourage your group to question you. Explore how you write and how you want to write, for there are infinite ways to put words on a page. Writing may be solitary, but it happens because we grow and learn from other people. I hope that everyone travels forward in their life with as much curiosity as possible.

Jenn was the Managing Editor of Water~Stone Review. Her piece, “Two Cents,” was published in The Under Review, and her sci-fi piece, “Promise to the Future,” was named as an honorable mention in Literary Taxidermy’s 2020 Short Story Competition. She currently volunteers at Red Bird Chapbooks and New American Press.