Maya Jewell Zeller

Raised by Ferns

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.

Forthcoming early 2026. Subscribe and follow for updates.

pub date: early Spring 2026
5.5 x 8.5 · 216 pages
$21.95 US · $28 CAN
ISBNs: TK
DISTRIBUTION:
1) Ingram Content Group
2) direct from Porphyry Press
(Friesens prints our offset runs)

what people are saying

“Not since Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts has someone redefined memoir so completely and beautifully as Maya Jewell Zeller does with Raised by Ferns. Zeller vividly recounts an itinerant childhood in the bracken and moss of Northwest watersheds, where the idea of “home” was an elusive, shifting, mercurial landscape, and freedom and boundlessness was lauded over consistency and stability. The prose shifts between the registers of Zeller's original language—the language of lichen, rocks, and fern, of poverty, place, and self-reliance—with the registers she learns and masters and doubts, including those of the reluctant middle-class homeowner, the eloquent scholar, the accomplished author. This is a memoir unparalleled for its intelligence, its poetry, its self-awareness, its generosity, its critique of defined boundaries and binding definitions. No book has so thoroughly changed me as this one did: Raised by Ferns urges us to converse with our past selves and examine, mourn, and celebrate the ways in which they form the wondrous selves we are now.”
—SHARMA SHIELDS, author of The Cassandra and Sasquatch Hunter’s Almanac

“Lovely, vital writing that challenges and makes personal the tired conceptions and biases we have about poverty.”
—JESS WALTER, author of The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins

on Zeller’s prior books of poetry:
“Maya Jewell Zeller's poems reverberate in my heart long after I've read and heard them. From lines, sounds, and visions, she creates little worlds, and I can't wait to see this brilliant mind creating the full universe of a book-length narrative.”
—ELISSA WASHUTA, author of White Magic and My Body is a Book of Rules

“I couldn’t put Raised by Ferns down. Maya Jewell Zeller writes so beautifully about the deep difficulty of understanding oneself fully. Once a child growing up in precarity and now an adult trying to ethically navigate her privileged positions, she writes with honesty and insight about what it means to embrace all of the different versions of themselves a person has been. The author of the influential essay “The Privilege Button,” in this memoir about growing up “in a van by the river,” as her son once describes her childhood, Zeller shows readers what it means to belong to an earth that is always moving beneath our feet, terrifying in her unpredictable changing, but also springing forth new berries and fish and fiddlehead ferns that can sustain a family through this day and the next. A thoughtful consideration of the myriad forms childhood poverty can take and the impacts it can have, this is also a memoir about learning to love the wildly reckless, confused, and brave child she once was. What does it mean to have been the kind of kid who would run away by leaping from a moving van and the kind who would protect her little sister when their father’s foreboding moods settled over the house? Beneath such a childhood's deep forest of shadows, surrounded by unfurling ferns, Zeller became the kind of woman who can write this book that shows us how to see the world around us in such beautiful, magical, compassionate, clear-eyed ways.”
—KATHRYN NUERNBERGER, author of The Witch of Eye

about the author

Maya Jewell Zeller, author of Raised by Ferns. Poto by Dean Davis

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.