Dear Readers:

In less than a week, The Wheelhouse Review will celebrate it’s one year anniversary. For those of you who don’t know (and who haven’t gotten us anything), it’s the paper anniversary. Specifically we would like this paper:

Courtesy of Pheasant Press

We wouldn’t have made it this year without readers. Literally. So we want to give you a gift to show our appreciation for your support…the gift of us reading what you have to say for a change. We want to know what were your favorite posts and why.

So from now through April 30, please let us know what your favorite reads were in the comments section. On May 1 we’ll will compile them into a post, thanking you each by name.

Thanks for visiting our Wheelhouse!

The Editors and Staff

Family, Friends, Faithful Readers, Clown-Obsessed Stalkers,

Could it be that The Wheelhouse Review has made it to one year of publication? It’s true though:  more than 300 posts, 17 writers, 3 artists, and over 13,000 readers like you have helped make our first year a success!

We’d like to celebrate many more years together (in the literary world, one year=seven) so we invite you to save the evening of Saturday, May 4 for a spectacular event in our birthplace of DC to commemorate our Paper Anniversary. Festivities to include an origami workshop led by our very own Ryan White (with bonus haikus) and a paper plane flight show organized by Juliet Vedral.

Courtesy of Scrap of Nowhere

Gifts of paper including Laser 32lb and cardstock are appreciated.

Location TBD and may or may not come in the form of an “enigma, wrapped in a mystery, with a creamy nougat filling.”

Kisses,

Juliet, Ryan, and The Wheelhouse Review Team!

New Year’s is a magical time, full of TV marathons (notably The Twilight Zone and Clarissa Explains it All), College Football, and of course, champagne-infused splitting headaches. But it’s also a time to reflect on the year gone by, to re-live some of its memorable and not-so-memorable moments, and of course, to churn out “Best of” lists so people have something to read when the sexual tension between Clarissa and Sam becomes too much to bear. So while we here at TWR don’t have a full year under our belts (happy eight month anniversary to us!), that won’t stop us from contributing to the Great American Tradition of End of the Year Lists. Here are some of the highlights from our posts of 2012 in sweet, glorious bullet point form:

• Juliet: I Am Woman, Leave Me Alone
• Alison: Summer Reading Series: Anne of Green Gables
• Sarah: The Time My Grandmother Fell Out of a Tree
• Ryan: Does This Subatomic Particle Make Me Look Fat? Explaining the Higgs Boson
• Faith: Potent Quotable #7: Flats Are For Quitters
• Amanda: Joy!
• Stephanie: Competitive Parenting

In addition to the hardworking, disproportionately-female writers listed above (“Toilet seat down, Ryan!”), we’ve also had the good fortune to work with several guest contributors in 2012. So a hearty thank you to generation-ologist Joe Anthony, resident movie reviewer Al Domeyko, Man of Few Words Howard Freeman, North Pole magazine hoarder Jacques Frost, horoscope interpreter Lily Hahn, designer extraordinaire Andrea Levendusky, local pub and Britishism enthusiast Tucker MacClaren, social media investigative reporter/taste tester Syd Rock, and music nostalgist Caitlin Welsh.

Finally, we also experimented with working together–in a totally work appropriate way though–and were lucky to produce some delicious, collaborative literary stew. Why? Because we’re brothers colleagues, and we kinda like each other. We had our epic Rashomon Week series that was simply unforgettable (we think….). And Juliet was the most attention-hogging prolific collaborator, addressing faith and politics with Stephanie in their Everybody’s a Little Bipartisan series, and gender issues with Ryan in their Sausage and Eggs series.

Here’s to a great three-fourths of a year of TWR in 2012 and an even better, non-fraction year of TWR in 2013.