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

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  • Osprey – A Short Story, Part 1

    4–6 minutes

    She didn’t like going for walks when it looked like it was going to rain. The rain itself didn’t bother her—Alexis kind of liked the cool droplets pinging against her forehead; maybe because being out in the rain made her feel like a little kid, or like a straight-laced intellectual led to freedom by some

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  • Femininity and Consumerism

    1–2 minutes

    Shoe obsessions. Purse collections. Homes carefully decorated with curated furniture. Counter-tops strewn with make-up, nail polish, hair products, and lotions. Perfume-soaked magazines plump with clothes to buy and styles to emulate. In America, we equate femininity with consumerism. It’s well known that advertisers build upon our insecurities–and oftentimes invent new ones for us–and then offer products

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  • Trading Soil for Pavement

    1–2 minutes

    This was all once alive. The abrupt smell of pavement was once the citrusy soil, the slight tingle of fermentation, undeniably sweetened by aging leaves of hemlock and maple, dark orange and a flat, slippery sort of yellow. Insects, bacteria, the microbiome. Once, long ago, the early evening brought robins together on tight tree elbows.

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  • The Truth About Stars and Rivers

    1–2 minutes

    There’s this nostalgia I feel when I walk along the river. I feel it also when I watch half-cloudy sunsets, and when I look for Orion and Canis major on winter nights. The cold sinks through my wool slippers as I stand on the concrete deck alongside my house. I tighten my robe’s sash and squint. Fuzz filling

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Learn more about Francesca Varela's novels