This week’s featured piece is a hauntingly beautiful poem by author and poet Laurel Snyder. Published in our Spring 2005 issue, “Well: The Girl Who Falls” will swallow you up and transport to an inescapable and unforgettable place.

“What we call weather
is sometimes like this,

around us, and with us
inside everything. Winter.”

Laurel Snyder is the author of six novels for children, as well as many picture books. In addition to her books for children, Laurel has written two books of poems, “Daphne & Jim: a choose-your-own-adventure biography in verse” (Burnside Review Press, 2005) and “The Myth of the Simple Machines” (No Tell Books, 2007). She also edited an anthology of nonfiction, “Half/Life: Jew-ish tales from Interfaith Homes” (Soft Skull Press, 2006). A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former Michener-Engle Fellow, Laurel has published work in the Utne Reader, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Revealer, Salon, The Iowa Review, American Letters and Commentary, and elsewhere. She is an occasional commentator for NPR’s All Things Considered, and she teaches in the MFAC program at Hamline University, and also in the creative writing department at Emory University. A Baltimore native, Laurel now lives in Atlanta with her family. For her full biography and more information about her work, visit laurelsnyder.com

Click here to read “Well: The Girl Who Falls”

Vintage Anomaly 128: Laurel Snyder’s “Well: The Girl Who Falls,” DB 7 was originally published in Anomaly on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.