The Sky Is A Well
And Other Shorts
With An Introduction by Ron Carlson
winner of the Rose Metal Press First Annual Short Short Chapbook Contest
ISBN 978-0-9789848-1-6

The two-color letterpress covers of this chapbook were printed at the Museum of Printing in North Andover, Massachusetts, and each copy was saddle-sewn together by hand. Available from Rose Metal Press.

The Sky is a Well chapbook was an entry in the 51st Annual New England Book Show and was chosen as a winner in the category, "Books: General Trade, nonillustrated". It was displayed at the Fairmont Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and then archived at the Burns Library at Boston College with the other winners of the New England Bookbuilders Award.

Cover typesetting, design, and letterpress printing by Rebecca Krzyzaniack with Abigail Beckel, using Kennerly foundry type. Floral engraving courtesy of The Museum of Printing.

"Lyric and gritty, glowing and graceful, The Sky Is a Well & Other Shorts is a complex and compact collection from Claudia Smith, funny-sad master of the short short form. Evocative of places and times long gone or going, the ephemera of memory and emotion, youth and age, each story unfolds like a song on a concept album-the pieces can stand alone, but together they blend into a seamless whole you'll want to hear again and again."
-Ron Carlson

"Claudia Smith's short prose-poem-stories are bright on the surface but they reach to surprising and powerful depths, and what lies beneath the surface is usually pretty dark. Each story is driven by something powerful and unspoken, a truth about the world that lies just beyond the page."
- Bookslut

a lovely review of The Sky Is A Well at the short review

"The narrators in the heartbreaking chapbook, The Sky Is a Well & Other Shorts, are all in search of something--comfort, nuturing, and, perhaps most of all, mother love. These are small girls, young women, adults with children of their own, who yearn for that moment of connection felt so keenly between parent and child. It is a feeling so hard to describe and yet Smith does so evocatively in her explorations of pinning down that moment of connection, or more often, that moment of loss in which the connection is gone forever."
- Myfanwy Collins

"Claudia's book is the perfect discovery. A small literary jewel, a collection of short and beautiful stories that go by in a flash but will stay with you forever, and the best kind of book to hold in your hand."
- Hobart

"A line like 'It depends on your criteria,' so straightforward and un-flashy, becomes heartbreaking when said by a fifteen-year-old girl to her fifteen-year-old girlfriend in the first girl's camel-colored Pacer while parked behind an abandoned warehouse, where they have gone to make out. The people in the stories seem to be on the edge of seeing themselves. But the stories never look down on them. The stories are all very short--most just a couple of pages. They're full of feeling and hard detail."
- James Whorton, author of Frankland, and Approximately Heaven.

"The stories in The Sky is a Well [ however ] are sober and deliberate and although each of them is complete, could easily become the beginning of a novel. ... the stories themselves are models of concision."
- Matt Briggs, author of Shoot the Buffalo, The Moss Gatherers, Misplaced Alice and The Remains of River Names.