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

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  • Mountain Ravens

    1–2 minutes

    The raven in the Wasatch does not sound like the raven in the Cascades; one is the sound of yellow aspen trees, the other, the sound of fog lifting from the river. They both honk, and so crackle like untended fires, but one is space, and one is movement; one is fields of asters–tall, velvet, yellow, purple–and one is the weight of

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  • The Desert Mountains

    1–2 minutes

    I see them, distant, in the space between buildings, brown and rounded and without snow. They are much like islands, risen high above this glinting sea. They do not turn pink at sunset; the sun, rather, is absorbed by their dense soils, like a dwindling fire, or the dust of embers. At some angles their

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  • The First Stream in Utah

    1–2 minutes

    You never loved the water more. You blink at the stream and feel that you are home, but even the cottonwoods are darker, and carry the bulk of firs. The stream is not so shaded that you can’t see your reflection and the naked mountain behind your head. This is your great river now; this is

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  • The Magnificent Frigatebird

    1–2 minutes

    I am the one who glides; where the air has become cold–that is what I call the sky, and I stay below it, among the shadow-birds, and at nightfall we  slow, so the wind moves faster than us, a silken pulse that bristles our feathers, that carves away the shadow-birds until they are the spray

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels