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

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  • Without Concrete

    1–2 minutes

    Sometimes I wonder what the world would look like if we lifted up the concrete. I mean, what if we ripped out all the roads, and the parking lots, and the driveways leading up to people’s houses? I keep imagining it, crumbling away like that, but I have a hard time imagining what would be

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  • The Plant With Purple Flowers

    1–2 minutes

    Until yesterday I hadn’t paid much attention to the American brooklime. I’m sure I’ve walked past it numerous times–in fields, in marshy pathways puddled with mud, alongside black streams smelling of a warm day’s shade. My life as a forest dweller has likely brought me into unbeknownst contact with the American brooklime countless times, year after year,

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  • Dusk Is Not A Summer Word

    1–2 minutes

    Dusk is not a summer word Because when the sun is behind the mountains the sky still holds, high up, stretching onward and onward, even once it is fully night the light holds on, into a silence, cool and echoing, like the moment when the sun has left your skin as the lingering warmth drains away, and you

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  • The Ash Grove

    2–3 minutes

    When I first found the ash tree, I thought of the song we used to sing in my grade school choir. Down yonder green valley, where streamlets meander, when twilight is fading, I pensively rove,  or at the bright noontide in solitude wander amid the dark shades of the lonely ash grove.  This was Oregon

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels