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

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  • The Marshmallow Plant

    1–2 minutes

    Althaea grows best in the warm nights of late-July, when the air is still scented with heat, and the sky lingers blue around the edges; when the night creaks with frogsong, and the wind calls softly, coaxing the flower up, like a star from the darkness, its petals veined like birchbark, shaped just like the

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  • Sauvie’s Island

    1–2 minutes

    A piece of a sand dollar in the dark gray riverbed, embedded in pebbles hewn as fine as black pepper. Here on the banks of the Columbia, an hour’s drive from the ocean, the water feels like its own gentle coastline, quiet ripples and a steep drop-off, and seagulls that fluff their feathers in the

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  • In the Dream

    1–2 minutes

    Sometimes I think I would rather live in the dream. As they sit by the fire, holding beer cups in their gloved hands, their mouths rippling with laughter, I press my back to the dying warmth, the last glow of sun, bled into rock, and, through the cold air above my sleeping bag, I watch

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  • Wolf

    1–2 minutes

    The salt-worn trees and their terraced arms white as bone, as cartilage, twined into rope and laced like string between cloud and earth. Wind blows through, caught in the late-light shadows, the teeth of baleen whales, gusts of seawater and krill, sea-wind and spring mosquitos, the ocean giving each footstep to the ferns, a slipped,

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels