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

BLOG

  • 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

    Read more…

  • Snow Clouds

    1–2 minutes

    The clouds are threaded with mountain-pink, andthe kind of muted purple that reflects from pondwater as it lies still at the moment of dusk, and the ravens blink the snow away, calling in their Cascade dialects, throaty songsthat catchin the fir needles like sunlight, and the snow falls in patches between the canopy and atop

    Read more…

  • Rain on the Ocean

    1–2 minutes

    The ocean is waiting there, pock marked in the way that dew hangs from jeweled firs, how itmelts the soft snow beneath it, and farther out, the white painted light is made ghostly where the horizon meets it and the white foam fray and the clouds brushed and bruised and half the ocean drawn through

    Read more…

  • Moonlight on the Windowsill

    1–2 minutes

    I see the moonlight blank against the windowsill sunk into the grains of wood, into the etchings of pencils and pressed fingernails carved like insect-scarred walking sticks we used to find in the forest, and mossy flakes from screen windows open too long in the summer, and they are golden, far too golden, and I

    Read more…

Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels