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

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  • Home Flower

    1–2 minutes

    Listen, I will speak their names– larkspur, trillium, stream violet, fairy lantern, vetch, vanilla leaf. I look out into the green and read their leaves, like language, like words on a page. I hear them speak, and know their songs, how the wind rustles them, how the pathfinder-plant flickers green and white, how the sedge whistles

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  • Fairy Terns

    1–2 minutes

    Fairy terns fly out to sea each dawn. White-winged and delicate, they travel in small caravans, drifting softly above the waves and white-caps. All day, they relish the sweet sun on their backs, and the fine salt spray on their bellies, but then the sun burns low, upon the flat, mottled Earth, and the fairy

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  • Time of the Crow

    1–2 minutes

    Along the river, at the time of pale-blue, the crows flow like black curtains, thousands of them, tens of thousands, enumerable and warm and beating. Just by looking at their wings I can feel the soft mist, the growing west wind, and I can hear the traffic growing dimmer beneath me. We course through, and

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  • Animal

    1–2 minutes

    How long has it been since you sat with your back against a tree, and looked up at the dark, straying rivers in the sky? How long has it been since you knelt at a streamside, and listened to the soft water sing of mountain snow, of old times and canyons walls, and the kind,

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels