‘A telling of a real story’: Maya Jewell Zeller’s ‘Raised by Ferns’ to be released in March
Maya Jewell Zeller is upfront that writing a memoir – and the truth-telling it requires – is a radical act.
“Having it come out in the community where many of the characters in the book live in this community is a dangerous thing, and therefore is a radical act,” Jewell Zeller said. “But it’s also a telling of a real story. The book is past-me, and I hold a lot of tenderness for the people around me in this book.”
On Tuesday, Porphyry Press will release of Jewell Zeller’s debut memoir in essays, “Raised by Ferns.” A launch party will follow on March 12. The book spans from the night she was born – “She carried unborn-me, still-curled me, to where mussels and anemones and sea stars and sculpins dart and burrow into their homes” – growing up wild, eating from nature and accessing literature through library vans to her recent past, talking about class and privilege with embedded homeowner association rules and SAT questions, navigating motherhood, unspoken middle-class rules, marriage and career.
Essays from “Raised by Ferns” have been used in classroom settings to start discussions about class and privilege.
“We have a whole kit pitching it to educators,” said Jeremy Pataky, founder and publisher of Porphyry Press. “This book should be taught in universities. And I’m pleased to say it is being taught in universities.
“Some of the essays that are in the book that have been priorly published in lit journals have already been being taught pretty regularly, but now I’m finding myself shipping cartons of books, including some that just went straight from the printers, pre-orders from college bookstores, because it’s already being assigned in universities.”
Jewell Zeller herself is an educator – an English professor at Central Washington University, as well as poetry and nature writing faculty at the low-residency MFA program at Western Colorado University. She is effusive about her students – “I really love my students, and I love teaching so much I love opening opportunities. And I have a friend who told me, ‘You don’t open doors, you slam them open’ ” – but the pressure as her family’s main breadwinner is a drumbeat throughout the book.
In telling her story, it was important to Jewell Zeller that it didn’t fall into the trap of poverty porn or become a transcendence narrative. Luckily, she could turn to her sister.
“Having my sister as a person who understood the language registers of my childhood and the ways that we code switch to move into formal, middle-class spaces, she understands that on a really, really cellular level, because she’s also lived it,” Jewell Zeller said. “So when I was writing ‘Raised by Ferns,’ I would just send the essays to her and say, ‘Hey, Raine, can you give this a read?’ ”
In “Scavenger Panorama,” she wrote, “When people ask me how I got from there to here, how a person ‘escapes poverty’–a question that I find irritating, to be honest; I’m not interested in giving life advice because I don’t think I’m an expert–I tell them I don’t see it as a vertical trajectory. I don’t see financial privilege as something I necessarily tried to achieve, though I did want the ground beneath me to be as stable as possible, laced together by the roots of growing things, strong enough in that fibrous rhizome that I didn’t become the detritus when the floods came. So I’ll tell you: I worked hard but I was also lucky.”
A theme the book returns to is the safety that Jewell Zeller finds in nature.
“There’s an essay in there where it starts: ‘I’m most myself when poking a dead cow with a stick.’ I feel like it’s a good exercise to ask yourself, like I would ask my students to do this, too,” said Jewell Zeller. “Like I am most myself when blank, and then name an action. I am most myself when lying on my back on the damp earth in a glade of ferns on the West Side of Washington State. You know, where my bones are getting cold.”
Jewell Zeller said at first, the book was receiving kind rejections, receiving feedback that it was “too lush.” But ultimately, she’s glad it wasn’t accepted in its earlier iterations, which wouldn’t have included the epilogue, “Blue Tongue.” When Zeller began writing the essays from the book in 2015, she was married. “Blue Tongue” was written in 2022.
“I had a conclusion to a narrative arc that I didn’t know was coming,” Jewell Zeller said. “So, my art did know, I didn’t know. I like to think of myself as a fairly prescient person, but I will just admit that while I was writing the earlier essays in the book, I didn’t know. So, the moments in those essays that are authentically cracks and fractures are authentic cracks and fractures.”
The book finding a home with Porphyry Press, based in McCarthy, Alaska, was a long time coming. Jewell Zeller attended college at Western Washington University with Pataky, who grew up in the Inland Northwest. Both poets, Pataky long-admired Jewell Zeller’s work. While visiting, he attended with his mom Jewell Zeller’s “Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts,” book release. By then, he had started Porphyry Press and told Jewell Zeller he would love to see a manuscript from her. “Raised by Ferns” was that manuscript, and Pataky started his day reading an essay from the collection, and then worked on the log sauna he was building while thinking about what he read.
“As the days went on, as I was working my way through the book, to kind of experience the accumulation of those essays together, and to find myself kind of roaming a field in my mind, from her book itself to the manuscript possible actual bookness, and just all the ways that I could imagine trying to help honor that book, if I could be given the chance,” Pataky said.
By then, Jewell Zeller had another offer on the table from a university press.
“I felt panic because I was like, this book is imminently publishable. It’s so good,” Pataky said. “She’d probably be crazy to let you know a kind of new, tiny, micro press from way off the grid, middle-of-nowhere Alaska publish it, but she should, and so I wrote her this gushing letter, sort of, to that effect.”
Pataky wanted to be the one to help “Raised by Ferns” find its readers.
“It’s a memoir written by a very intelligent and educated poet who both has a sponge of a brain for knowledge and also an incredibly expert grip on language and form and even formally where she’s incorporating SAT questions as a way to frame, or HOA law, whatever bylaws,” Pataky said. “It’s incredibly sophisticated in so many ways, but I think it’s accessible even for readers who don’t necessarily read a lot of literary books.”
Pataky also described it as a counterpoint to “Hillbilly Elegy,” the memoir written by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.
“It’s a pretty articulate answer to the ways in which that book was problematically published and I think that even looking at Maya’s own background … Her dad’s an immigrant, they grew up poor, not for lack of working hard,” Pataky said.
Jewell Zeller wrote about Vance and his book before he was in the White House. In the essay “Ruin Porn,” she wrote, “I almost threw it out the window! But I hang onto the occasionally contained self I’ve built on top of the also uncontained self, the one who would break something out of anger, whose child-self coping mechanisms involved outbursts of violence, things modeled for me and still inside me with which I cannot make peace or even fully recover, even as other parts of me think ‘don’t throw that stupid book; it would cost a month’s groceries to replace that window…’ ”
Pataky pointed out that it would be reductive to call “Raised by Ferns” just a book about nature, or just a book about class, or motherhood or marriage. But through all of the lenses Jewell Zeller provides, there is a constant honoring of her selves.
Jewell Zeller brought up the Joan Didion quote about “keeping on nodding terms with your past selves,” and said, “We’re like trees, like – not too many eco-metaphors, but the core is there. And there’s another layer on top of it, and the layer we see is outside, the bark, but all those other layers are there. Like, cut me open. Cut me open, and poverty child is right there. And it’s not something you transcend, it’s something you bring along.”