Two forthcoming books
As fall casts another spell on the Wrangells and books shuffle through the To Be Read pile, we’re very excited to announce two new titles forthcoming from Porphyry Press: Ghosts of Distant Trees by Erica Watson of Denali Park, Alaska and Raised by Ferns by Maya Jewell Zeller of Spokane, Washington.
Both books are memoirs-in-essays. Erica’s is her debut book, and Maya’s is her first book of nonfiction following several books of poetry and a textbook. We’re thrilled to bring you these two fantastic reads, and eager for these two new Porphyry pressmates to get to know each other and each others’ work.
Stay tuned and follow Porphyry Press on social media for more info and opportunities down the line to stay in the know: see the cover reveals in due time, preorder the books, become a press patron, make plans to attend book launches, and more.
~Jeremy
1.
Art: In Cold Shadow by Sara Tabbert
Ghosts of Distant Trees
by Erica Watson
coming late 2025
Combining narrative and lyric essays, this collection reckons with coming of age in a warming world, invoking humor, ecological grief, and social commentary. When Erica Watson arrives at Denali National Park, Alaska as a college student, she encounters an expansive, dynamic landscape, and a community shaped by seasonal fluctuations of a tourism economy and subarctic latitude.
Erica interrogates the social and logistical roles of the lone road transecting the park and other aspects of the built and natural environments. The road stages troubling interactions with men and dramatic weather events, and catalyzes conversations about civic values and heavy industry in national parks.
Travels away from Alaska offer an opportunity to reflect on family, the privileges afforded by mobility, and the sometimes uneasy legacies of American conservation. Erica often turns her attention from the iconic landscape to the small and easily overlooked: individual pieces of road gravel, an orange peel tossed from a car window, homegrown tomatoes, a flower gone to seed.
As years pass and the Denali community becomes home, her examinations of the natural world, labor, politics, gender, sexuality, and belonging gain nuance and complexity. Threaded with unsettling observations as forests burn and permafrost thaws, Ghosts of Distant Trees arrives at a place of acceptance and unease, eyes open to rapid change.
Erica Watson grew up primarily in the U.S. Southwest, in a National Park Service family. While an undergraduate studying creative writing, women’s studies, and Spanish at the University of Arizona in Tucson, she spent summers in Denali National Park, Alaska, where she eventually settled year round. Erica completed her MFA in creative nonfiction at the University of Alaska Anchorage, where she received the Jason Wenger Award for Excellence in Writing. Her work centers climate crisis, community, politics, and land management, and has appeared in regional and national literary journals and magazines. Erica has worked in conservation, tourism, and environmental education, all of which inform her writing. ericarobinwatson.com
2.
Raised by Ferns
by Maya Jewell Zeller
coming early 2026
The lyric essays of Raised by Ferns question and destabilize definitions of privilege and poverty, of outer and inner wilds, and of what home means. Born in a gas station on the Oregon coast during the 1970s, Maya Jewell Zeller came of age in Cascadia’s rambling temperate rainforests and rural flood plains, before shifting inland to its basalt scablands and high desert. With an immigrant father affected by the early loss of his mother, lack of access to education, and addiction, and a midwestern mother who sought solace from her own traumas in the romance of the rugged pastoral, Zeller’s first friends and best teachers were the natural world and public libraries. Shifting between fecund childhood landscapes and her discomfiting middle-class adulthood homes, the author comes to question the infinite need to codeswitch and triangulate between past and present selves.
“I want my children to inherit more than whatever impermanence exists in money,” writes Zeller, pushing back against poverty porn and complicating the privileges a feral girl holds onto as she becomes a woman.
Raised by Ferns is both a powerful memoir and a collection of rhizomatic stories interrogating home and not-home, family and community, parenting and identity, and women’s bodies as sites of extensive, ongoing acculturation and wonder. Zeller’s version of adult security is, for her, an almost painfully American one, steeped in the knowledge that the relationships and systems on which we build lives and worlds are only as stable as the people in them. Above all, she has to trust her own mind, mapping with the land the static violences of middle class life and the struggle to feel safe in its promises. All while the land itself braces, always, for imminent fire and flood.
A 2024 Washington State Artist Trust Fellow, Maya Jewell Zeller is the author of out takes/ glove box (2023), chosen by Eduardo Corral as winner of the 2022 New American Poetry Prize; and co-author of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024) as well as the interdisciplinary collaboration, with visual artist Carrie DeBacker, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017). Earlier collections include the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015) and Rust Fish (Lost Horse Press, 2011). She is also co-editor of Evergreen: Grim Tales & Verses From the Gloomy Northwest (Scablands Books, 2021). Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a Writing Fellowship from Oxford, and a Residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, Maya has presented her work in Madrid, as part of the Unamuno Author Festival, and at the University of Oxford. Maya serves as Associate Professor for Central Washington University and Affiliate Faculty in Poetry and Nature Writing for the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University. She lives in the Inland Northwest with her children. mayajewellzeller.com
