“Raised by Ferns”
By Maya Jewell Zeller; Porphyry Press, 2026; 251 pages; $23.95.
Porphyry Press, a small, independent literary press based in McCarthy, is becoming known for its select list of nonfiction titles by northern writers. Beginning with three books by Alaskans — Tom Kizzia’s “Cold Mountain Path,” John Messick ‘s “Compass Lines” and Erica Watson’s “Ghosts of Distant Trees” — publisher Jeremy Pataky has reached geographically and stylistically farther with Maya Jewell Zeller’s “Raised by Ferns.”
“Raised by Ferns” is a memoir consisting of discrete but connected essays related to Zeller’s life in the rural Pacific Northwest, where she grew up in a loving but chaotic family that gave her an unlikely start to her later academic career and the middle-class security she sought for her own children. The individual essays are lyrical, deeply metaphorical and well informed by the greater American culture that surrounds modern life. They speak back and forth to one another, repeating and resonating in different registers, much like a choral work.
The early and final essays chart much of the author’s childhood. With her parents and two siblings, Zeller moved among small towns and rentals on back roads, engaging in family “business ventures” — operating a gas station and then a tavern, selling absorbent cloths at flea markets, replacing the felt on pool tables and towing cars. The children were constantly changing homes and schools; they sometimes lived in vehicles and often were not attending school at all but scavenging fields and forests for berries and whatever else they could eat. For a time, with access from a rental space to an adjacent furniture store, the children spent nights on the clean, comfy mattresses in the store and rose early to avoid detection.
With each move, Zeller and her siblings were each allowed to pack one box — the size of an apple crate. “In my ‘taking along’ box, besides a few shells and rocks and a vial of apple stems I kept for superstition, I made a whole world of tiny, tiny animals and a few small teddy bears — about an inch tall, like you see on key chains in variety stores or gumball machines — and I made them little fabric coats from my sewing scraps, and little billiard cloth hats, and paper sets against which we’d perform plays, which I scripted and cast with the little animal characters.”
In Zeller’s telling, it was not a terrible life, except for the torment by other children and the occasional episodes of violence. Living close to the land and having access to public libraries were formative to her identity and well-being. As an adult, after earning college scholarships and eventually landing a job teaching poetry, Zeller liked to tell people that she “was raised by ferns.”
The essays often question privilege — what it is, how one gets it, how one who has it should respond. As a “young poet with low elite-culture literacy,” Zeller was often embarrassed by what she didn’t know — for example, mispronouncing rosé wine as rose wine. When she married and moved to a home in the suburbs, she discovered what an HOA — a home owners association — is and was uncomfortable with its many rules and customs. (She uses parts of an HOA contract for her essay framework.) “I had never dreamed of living in a suburb, but suddenly, after five years teaching at a university, I wanted to, and s small part of me, the part of which I somehow felt ashamed, felt I was entitled to live away from daily crime. Did my entitlement grow out of the privilege (the security?) I’d managed to sustain?”
A recurring metaphor for the privileged life is what Zeller calls the “privilege button” — the button on her automatic garage door opener. She tells her students this and “I want to believe if we communicate thoughtfully across our intersectional advantages and disadvantages, we might bridge some boundaries. I tell them I still need to work on my daily actions, my hypocrisies — we all do.”
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One particularly powerful essay, “Complete the Sentence,” uses her children’s school tests and SAT exam questions to frame the questions she has about socioeconomic bias. A pair of words relate to one another as two other words relate. Medicine is to illness as _____. Zeller interrogates the word pairs as she understood them as a young person and finds herself with “wrong” answers. She makes up her own word pairings; Maya is to college as _____.
In “Landscape Anxiety,” Zeller begins with a quote from writer John Gardner, to the effect that in literature there are only two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Zeller, commuting long distances between jobs, identified with both plots. In short segments and shorter paragraphs, she moves among facts about her bifurcated life, childhood memories, “landscape anxiety” and literary references.
“Raised by Ferns” is a welcome addition both to thought about lower-income rural life and to the expansion of what we may consider as essay collections and memoir. Zeller, a poet at heart, leans into the questions any of might have about how families and places shape us, and what identity truly means.
Zeller is the author of, besides her new memoir, three poetry collections, two anthologies and a book about fungi.
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