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

BLOG

  • A Box Full of Goodness

    1–2 minutes

    Guess what arrived in the mail last night? Advance copies of my second novel, Listen! No matter how many books I might publish in my lifetime, I don’t think I’ll ever get used to this feeling. My words, my story, my characters, all brought into tangible existence! It finally feels real. I’m a published author? A two-time published

    Read more…

  • Tangible Stars

    1–2 minutes

    In some ways the trees are as unknowable as the stars. Here they are, tangible secrets, immense suns and mountains that are somehow alive before us. Let us feel their comfort and their power, and call them small deities, for here the stars have fallen at our feet, and look how mindlessly we stomp over them.

    Read more…

  • The Hazelnut Tree

    1–2 minutes

    The hazelnut tree, the old Corylus cornuta, is yellow rain beyond my window. The warm glow of dripping candles, the fringed hair of some ever living willow. It is the aftermist of an ocean wave, and riverbank leaves decaying in water. As I look at the hazelnut I forget about winter, because with those delicate catkins come the

    Read more…

  • The First Falling of Snow

    1–2 minutes

    Low winter light buried by snow, all sounds threaded in gracile knots, while the trees drip, while we tingle with silence, we breath again, as though we have come up for air in a world that was once underwater.  

    Read more…

Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels