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

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  • Who We Are

    1–2 minutes

    Watch; if we stare at other suns, we won’t see our own, and if we block our eyes we will see nothing but darkness, but look straight into it into the scalding water, pierce the steam, and so dies the life of shadow.

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  • When Hummingbirds Call

    1–2 minutes

    When, last, did you hear the song of a hummingbird? It’s a sound that I recognize immediately, and yet, if I try to think of it, right now, in my head, I can’t mimic it exactly. It’s an odd sound. Just the other day I was sitting beneath the maple tree, and I heard it–like metal, like dropped

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  • Return to the River

    1–2 minutes

    “Osprey,” I said in my thoughts. “I’d like to see you again. Where are you, Osprey?” And at that moment the osprey flew off the river-wind and into a maple tree. Without stopping, or even slowing, she tore off a branch and fastened it in her talons. “For her nest,” I thought. “I’ll see where

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  • The Sun Bird

    1–2 minutes

    I sat by the water, among the ducks and the geese. The stream, milky and deep, sifted into the river. I watched the reflections of newly unfurled cottonwood trees get caught in its currents. As I turned my head, an osprey poured forth from the sun, its wings a mask, patterned and finely painted. Twice her

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels