Don Corely devotes himself to daily walks through his family's meadowland, seeking solace from the troubling questions of abandonment that surround his mother's mysterious death when he was a kid: Was it suicide or an accident? So caught in the past, he is blind to the land's well-being as a warming climate threatens, until a stranger, Sakura Gonzalez, who claims ancestral ties to the land, appears and unleashes family secrets, forcing him to confront a drying, fading meadow. As they toil there one summer, Corely tangles with matters of the heart, landownership, and ways to sustain the meadowland's past as well as its future.

A family drama set in the American Southwest, The Geology of Secrets explores the power of the past and how it can fuel denial within our relationships with those we care for and the places we call ours. Interconnectedness and land use serve as high-stakes issues in the face of climate threat-involving how to sustain or restore native ecosystems in our country and beyond through science and the endangered wisdom of Indigenous and multicultural stories.

DEBRA HUGHES is the author of Albuquerque in Our Time: 30 Voices, 300 Years. Her short fiction has been anthologized in Tierra: Short Fiction of New Mexico and Walking the Twilight: Women Writers of the Southwest and has appeared in Image, New Letters, Blue Mesa Review, and other publications. Her essays and articles, for which she received the International Regional Magazine Silver Award, have been published in Narrative Magazine, Huffington Post, The Writer's Harbrace Handbook, New Mexico Magazine, USA Today, and elsewhere. She served as a founding advisory board member of Narrative Magazine and is a member of the Author's Guild and New Mexico Writers. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Read more about the author at debrahughes.com.