By Lisa Laughlin
“Raised by Ferns” is a smart, lyric essay debut from local writer Maya Jewell Zeller. Published this spring by Porphyry Press, America’s most remote publishing press, in McCarthy, Alaska, this book is a memoir-in-essays that holds both beauty and zing.
“Raised by Ferns” takes readers from the moon-soaked beaches of the Oregon Coast, where Zeller was born above a gas station in the 1970s, to the shrub-steppe of central Washington as Zeller traces a nonlinear path from her itinerant, rural childhood—where she was “raised by ferns”—through academia and into middle class.
Key essays like “The Privilege Button” reject a traditional poverty-escape narrative as Zeller explores the guilt of “passing” as middle class, the benefit of a scavenger mindset and complicates things like foraging for mushrooms as a hobby of the privileged. Her essays in this book are both mosaic and expansive.
“When people ask me how I got from there to here, how a person ‘escapes poverty’ [. . .] I tell them I don’t see it as a vertical trajectory,” Zeller writes. From microchimeric cells to the many directions the leaves of the balsamroot point, Zeller looks at elements of the natural world to explore culture shock in academia, how we define home, and burnout as she navigates a toxic divorce. It is a book written from a place of love and curiosity that isn’t afraid to call out complex systems like class and education.
“[Ferns] rhizome and grow, and they send into themselves new selves, upspringing and unfurling. Spore, spiral, and grow. Repeat,” writes Zeller. We can feel Zeller doing the same as she explores life on these pages. (Lisa Laughlin)
