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

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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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  • Canopy Sunlight

    1–2 minutes

    How many times have I walked through the forest and never noticed the face in the fallen tree, the lichen draped like brittle hair, the skin made of centuries of mud and fungi long exposed long cracked in the sun, the cheekbones made of desiccated roots, palled by spider-webs the lace reaching down the chin…

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels