A Review of Raised by Ferns by Maya Jewell Zeller

Every so often, you find a book that shoots straight into your writer’s heart; one that you know you’ll return to whenever you need a bit of inspiration, to reach into the good life force that the writer has created on its pages. Maya Jewell Zeller’s memoir-in-essays Raised by Ferns (Porphyry Press, 2026) is the latest book of that kind for me. 

Zeller is a poet, and that’s clear from the start. This is a book that’s going to say something using close, imaginative examination and fine-tuned language. Zeller has always been a fan of hybrid work, and her memoir is no exception. It’s the perfect form for the topic: a burn-it-down, break-through-the-bullshit mode for a narrator who takes on topics of class, academia and poverty in America. 

Zeller is uniquely positioned to do so—she tracks her nonlinear path from an itinerant childhood on Oregon’s rural coast to a middle-class life where she never stops examining privilege, ending up a college professor herself. Zeller does this in the way of a good memoir, through self-examination, honesty and curiosity on the page. 

The book’s opening essay, “The Privilege Button,” begins with a scene where Zeller is ordering wine and does not know how to pronounce rosé. She asks for a glass of rose, like the flower, and uses that first examination of shame to crack into the cultural divides of our society. She doesn’t stay there—the very next section in the essay quotes Spanish poet Federico Garcìa Lorca, setting the tone for the way this memoir has no tolerance for tradition, using creative leaps instead to say something between the spaces. 

Zeller tries again and again to tell her life’s story in a straight line in “On a Beach in Oregon, 1970s Gas Shortage,” but it comes in fits and starts, in a series of retellings and truth-questionings, the circular nature of it highlighting how the beast of personal memory and story is a hard thing to pin down. Zeller finds it more honest and interesting to show that on the page. 

In many ways, this is a book on about-to-explode-pressures, about constant re-homing and inter-class interactions and a spouse’s marital infidelity.

The way Zeller plays with form throughout Ferns uniquely engages the reader, an example being “Complete the Sentence,” where she examines both real and imagined school assignments (from her son’s first-grade spelling homework to her daughter’s SAT prep questions) and asks the reader to fill in the blanks. It is a critique of the cultural literacy that is required to answer those sorts of questions. Having experienced my own cultural barriers in academia—going from a rural small town to a state University, not knowing what a caveat was but understanding my fellow freshmen liked to throw the term around as shorthand for belonging there—I read this essay as a powerful acknowledgement that there are many types of intelligence, and that we undervalue or miss them when we evaluate only from a standardized test. 

In Zeller’s first college class, which assumed a middle-class standing in its students, she writes that she “kept quiet; I was not interested in being a lab rat. I was not interested in changing, in their view, from a competent, assertive person I’d worked so hard to become to an anomaly of class transcendence. How many questions would follow? They were questions I did not feel comfortable answering. I still don’t.”

Zeller sets this inhibition aside to pen this memoir, and we’re lucky she does. She is able to tell us why “poverty porn” is something the middle class continues to get off on while she resists an easily packaged poverty-to-privilege narrative. Also known as the American Dream. 

While it dishes out cultural critiques, Raised by Ferns also contains great nature writing, from descriptions of the way a fern unfurls like a self to a surprise encounter with a herd of wild horses while Zeller waits for her parents to recover a billiards table for money. That’s not to say her nature writing is all pretty. In “Scavenger Panorama,” Zeller writes that she is “not interested in another pastoral that shows you the honey but not the sting” as she pokes at a dead cow with a stick and waits for it to explode, a moment where she says she feels most herself. 

In many ways, this is a book on about-to-explode-pressures, about constant re-homing and inter-class interactions and a spouse’s marital infidelity. It’s about a mother who spreads herself so thin from trying to span all the lines, do all the things, that she begins to unravel, detailed in “Landscape Anxiety” as Zeller traverses the high desert of Central Washington ad nauseam to teach at the college there and make two parts of her life fit together. 

Zeller begins to process things she never has before, suspects it has something to do with the stripped-bare desert around her, and makes a macabre comparison with taxidermy as she realizes that “she’s different inside from the parts of her she’s heard and seen and laid out on the landscape, and the parts that are like an animal, killed and carved out and stuffed, and then bloomed back alive. She blooms them back alive. She knows this. No one else does. No one else even notices she died and kept driving. Kept making dinner.” As a fellow spread-thin mother, I applauded how Zeller’s interior examination created space for solidarity. 

One of Zeller’s final essays is titled “How to Trespass.” By then, the reader is so wholly with her that we want to jump the fences of our own lives to discover what wonderful ruin and illumination awaits.