White desk with pink notebook, roses, keyboard, and gold paperclips that Francesca Varela uses to write environmental fiction

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  • Redwoods at Dusk

    1–2 minutes

    Sunlight frayed silken curtained through dusk branches, dust twinkling in the way of fireflies, ferns sorrel and huckleberry starts quivering as low-down sunlightslants their leaves with waning warmth and the wind carriesfar-off fogand river smells and the canopy above them turns in the other wind the hidden wind that never reaches the ground.

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  • Hillside Grass

    1–2 minutes

    The wind through hillside grass, yellow-tumbled, changing shape and shadow as though a cloud is passing over them, casting a thin veil of dark-gray light that blends into the purple heads of the wild grasses, and if you watch carefully enough, it appears as though the hill is moving, just pieces of it, carpets of…

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  • The Dance of the Water Ouzel

    1–2 minutes

    The sun it dances across the water ouzel’s plain, the dimpled mirror where she catches the green-sunken river in her beak, and carries it, fat with caddisflies and dragonfly nymphs and small, struggling crawdads, her eyes trained to the warm-sun to the cottonwoods to the smooth stone midway through the river where the current ripples…

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  • Stained Glass Ripples

    1–2 minutes

    The mist hangs there a cloud pressed to glass by early afternoon, the water flowing into churn and froth, the river stones chirping against each other as they toss under the force of the waterfall, and on the shore the blackened trunks of old firs catch sun through cloud light still healing from wildfire scars…

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels