By Anna Chotlos
Featured Art: “Traffic Garden” by Arlene Tribbia

Raised by Ferns (Porphyry Press, 2026), a memoir by Maya Jewell Zeller, maps a journey through the sometimes-strange wildernesses of self, from her upbringing among ferns, wild blackberries and public libraries to a literary life as a professor, navigating the comforts and discomforts of a suburban environment. Zeller’s prose offers close attention to “the transportable treasures of a shifting, unpredictable world” (213). (Poets always write the best memoirs.) Rendering the rural Pacific Northwest of her childhood and ongoing questions of identity and belonging with nuance and tenderness, Zeller writes “against easily categorized notions of what poverty and privilege mean” (166) and toward complexity and capacity.  

In addition to Raised by Ferns, Maya Jewell Zeller’s recent books include The Wonder of Mushrooms and out takes / glovebox. Zeller’s poetry and prose appear widely, including in New Ohio Review, where her poem “Craiglist” was selected by Billy Collins as the winner of the 2012 New Ohio Review Poetry Contest.  

(This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Anna Chotlos: One of the first things I noticed about Raised by Ferns was form—the HOA regulations in “The Privilege Button,” the USDA fire rating system in “Poverty Fires,” SAT questions in “Complete the Sentence,” and the way you’re bringing those forms into your essays. In your writing process, which comes first, the form or the content? How do you think about the relationship between the two? 

Maya Jewell Zeller: As someone steeped in a lot of genres, I’m interested in form as a challenge and also as a container. I come from the land of poetry before prose, and I’m very interested in what Denise Levertov describes as organic form in her essay “Some Notes on Organic Form.” In that essay, Levertov refers to the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ concept of inscape [the unique, internal identity of an object expressed through its outward form]. Likewise, whether I’m writing poetry, essay or fiction, my form tends to follow the emotional inscape or the intellectual and emotional inscape of the piece. 

Does form come first or the piece come first? I think they emerge organically together and so does genre and then the form helps guide the writing of the piece. 

What usually happens is I get excited to lay, and I give myself these little containers. If I’m writing a poem that feels like a little song with a dance and a turn, then that’s a sonnet. If I feel myself writing an essay that plays up against a tension between a societal construct and my narrative, then the construct often becomes a formal part of the essay. In the case of “Poverty Files” and “The Privilege Button,” those essays were written with the constructs in play, but they started in journaling—some little journaling seeds of ideas, following the idea into the forest, as Mary Ruefle would say. Though the joke about the privilege button and the central objective correlative of the garage door opener preceded the essay, the idea of weaving in those HOA covenants against the narrative emerged after I began the essay. The covenants help us think about the things in the adult Maya’s life that were so foreign to her from childhood and the covenants in which she feels so uncomfortable. 

I also think about the way that Eula Biss talks about writing “The Pain Scale.” In interviews, Biss points to how the material was an amorphous mess until she figured out how to structure it. While my essays are not exactly using the Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola hermit crab essay structure, I would say they are related but are using content up against form rather than as a container. 

AC: Raised by Ferns has the memoir quality of having a consistent persona throughout—I felt embedded in the same perspective, the same voice through the whole book, but the book also maintains essayistic qualities of associations, nonlinearity, of going down these little memory paths and a sense of what Philip Lopate describes [in his definition of the essay] as a single hot coal drawn from the volcano of self (which I love because I like thinking about myself as a volcano). How did you approach moving between those modes of thinking? 

MJZ: Gaping rim of the wound! I’m grateful that you’re able to see the memoir quality and the essay quality of this book, because it is both. It’s an essay collection and it’s a memoir. 

I was working with an agent who said she’d like me to dive more into childhood and have more of a throughline, an arc of what’s happening with the narrator, a story.  

When I was working on making it a memoir, I was thinking intentionally about the things that as poet, I take for granted. As a poet, I don’t actually care about plot or whether a character resolves anything. I think of poetry as being image, music and voice. I think of story as being character, plot arc and setting. And in an essay, you can pick and choose from that menu. I chose some plot things, some character things, and some poetry associative things and put them together however the hell I wanted. All of those essays are lyric narratives.  

One of the things that I had to do in this book—and this was the sad part: I had these weird little lyric essays that had appeared in places like Seneca Review and Gettysburg Review. They weren’t plot-driven. They were lyric weirds. They were these interstitial wanderings that were just a little bit too long and pulled away from that memoir arc. I had to pull those. 

AC: That anticipates my next question: What didn’t get included in the book? Despite your hard choices about what fits into the memoir box, as a reader, I had a sense of a mycelial net under this book of the lyric weirds popping through. 

MJZ: Those lyric weirds are now in a pile in another manuscript. They were kind of my favorites. They were like “poet goes into the woods and has relationship with moss” or “poet goes into the woods and imagines log as whale.” And they were like sexy in a way that like this book, this book is less sexy. I shouldn’t say that, but… 

 AC: Well, you do end the book floating down a river full of deer carcasses.  

 MJZ: [Laughter] Hopefully that opens up into other possibilities, but… 

MJZ: Yeah, and you get a little bit of that in like “Raised by Ferns” or in “Landscape Anxiety” in Section 3, when you really get into the things this narrator has been carrying that are part of the poverty, but she hadn’t talked about yet. It’s the three a.m. of the book. We’re having a slumber party and we get to “Landscape Anxiety.” That essay gets to be weird. That essay is one of the most poetry essays of the book, and it gets into wandering into the deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep lyric self. In this essay, there’s a lot of poets and poetry referenced and then things get kind of sad. That section originally also had an essay called “Maya and the Whales” and one called “Repped by Trees.” Those were essays in which I did a deep lyric, almost metacognitive wander into the subconscious self.  They were essays about pain and the deep misunderstood self, to be a little emo about it.   

I had to pull them because they didn’t do anything that “Landscape Anxiety” didn’t do in terms of plot. In a poetry manuscript, you can have a whole poem that’s just about interiority. In a memoir you can’t, or you can, but it’s harder to get away with. You can’t have as many of them.  

The Francesca Woodman essay, the series of letters to Francesca Woodman, where the narrator kind of dissociates and is experiencing some weird postpartum depression—I got to keep that because I put the italicized paragraph at the beginning that explained why the narrator was directly addressing a dead photographer. Why is she directly addressing a dead photographer? Because her son had been born. He almost died. He could have died. She could have died. And to pull herself back to the living, she wrote letters about childhood to a dead photographer with whom she was obsessed. Right. Like that makes sense. 

AC: That’s actually one of my favorite essays in the collection.  

MJZ: It’s one of my favorite essays too. I had to fight to keep it.  

AC: Yeah, it feels like that tension is very much in conversation with the questions in “Privilege Button” and “Raised by Ferns” in which the persona is holding on to these significant and valuable aspects of her childhood, like her box of treasures and trying to figure out how to pass those values and perspectives on to her children alongside the benefits of privilege. It’s about trying to have it all—navigating community while also creating the security and peace of being in that suburban bubble.  

MJZ: Obviously, essay means to try. I’m trying to not homogenize the essay collection the way that I’m hoping to not to homogenize my children by raising them in systems that are dissonant from my core personality and my core beliefs.  

You can’t see, but there’s a wildscape behind me, around me. It’s not fancy. It doesn’t feel suburban. You don’t see composite white fences, that’s not what’s happening here. We’re proximate to a suburban urban wildscape. That is really important to the setting of the book and the setting of self. This book couldn’t have been written in a city. It couldn’t have been written in a suburbia that looks like the Weeds neighborhoods. It was partially written in an apartment in a small town. It was important to me to try to ground it in a non-homogenized, complex, capacious, layered version of self. And that’s the same thing I want for my children. I want capacity.  

 
AC: Yeah, the desire for capacity! It’s also one of the things that isn’t fully resolved by the end of the memoir in a really interesting way. 

MJZ: Thank you. What do you mean by that? 

 
AC: The memoir begins with the persona uneasily adapting to the environment of HOA regulations, but ends with the end of the marriage, and the family floating down a river of deer carcasses, and the grief of having to let go of a particular vision of the future and figure something else out. How did you decide when to end the memoir, or where it needed to end? 

 
MJZ: Thank you for recognizing the grief. The last essay—the epilogue—does end in grief. I was deep in the end of my marriage when I was finishing this memoir.  

When I was initially working on this book in about 2020, the same time that the pandemic was happening, I didn’t know that the book would end with my marriage ending, because my marriage was still continuing. I was facing so many other things. The book could have ended differently if I finished it earlier. It could have been a book full of hope and a book about achieving a kind of American dream.  

The last gift that my marriage gave my book was this intense, dramatic irony. You know the whole “Your writing knows before you know”? Absolutely true. I imagine that readers would be like, “She must have known.” I didn’t. I didn’t know the narrative conclusion of this book until I got there. I could have ended the book without the end of my marriage. Including that, it answered a lot of questions about discomfort. I’m kind of scared to say this: What I realized while I was writing and rewriting the book was that I didn’t feel uncomfortable with privilege. I felt uncomfortable with the particular version of privilege inside my oppressive marriage.  

For me, carrying around my past wasn’t bothering me. It was carrying it around with my present. I hadn’t even known that I was dragging this double load and realizing that helped me understand how to end the memoir. I was like, Oh! my book is about poverty and privilege and the deep wildness of self that was never met with a mirror.  

It’s not that my book is about marriage. It’s about identity, and the marriage in which I lived was dissonant to the person that I needed to be. The partnership could have made so many things possible; instead it made a lot of things impossible for me.  

 AC: Yes. I was really impressed by the way that your memoir navigated that grief with such tenderness. 

MJZ: I want to hold the self in the book the whole time, and the self outside the book now, and family members in the book, with a capacity for looking at them with—I like that you said tenderness. The memoir had to end with reality, and the reality at the time of finishing the book was still really messy. It was hard to know what to include. 

And those are choices we make. When I talk to students, I say, you don’t have to write about your current mess. Choose a past self, one timeline ago, but with the capacity to evaluate from this timeline. Like Joan Didion’s being on nodding terms with your past selves [in “Slouching Toward Bethlehem”]. You get to decide how you construct that narrator. I chose one that was clear-eyed about lots of things and then intentionally not clear-eyed about others. I did that on purpose because I’m interested in documenting lives. 

AC: It is also relatable for readers: I think many of us have had the experience of navigating the discomfort of changing and growing as we learn and live. That’s a really hard thing to deal with as a writer. I’m trying to revise my dissertation manuscript and trying to get back into what I was writing only about a year ago and being like, “Who is that person?” 

MJZ: Right? And what the hell was she thinking? And why couldn’t she understand these things? And how do I rewrite them so that she does? Without being smug. 

AC: Another thing I loved about your memoir is how, especially in the first half, you engage with family stories about who the persona is, where she comes from, and how she got here, and that process of developing self-knowledge. I read the essay “Library/Van” as being about becoming a librarian of the self and I wanted to know more about what the process of cataloging those family stories was like for you? You mentioned comparing notes with your sister at one point. What most surprised you about those conversations? 

MJZ: When I would finish an essay, I would immediately send it to my sister, who is not a writer. She’s a really generous person and a generous reader. We are different people. And because our family moved a lot, our childhoods were different. She had things like flute lessons and I did not. I was like, I’m going to take this big buoy that landed in our field after the flood and turn it into a rope swing, and she was like, I’m gonna try out for volleyball. She would say, “Yes, I remember that.” It’s affirming when we have a reader we can trust who isn’t a writer and isn’t going to tell us anything about how to write the essay. She almost never contradicted me, which was also really affirming and permission-giving. She would say, “I love how you wrote this. It made me think about blankety blank.” And then she would give me ideas—our conversations would make me think of other things I could write about. That was really useful.  

I’m not close with my dad, but I did try to interview him. That kind of failed. I had to get a lot of bits of pieces of things from my mother. But it did engender some family conversations. It helped me think about the ways that we can be kind and unkind to our past selves and our families.  

Interrogating and rearranging the library of self is an endless, endless process that moves in cycles. We can tunnel down into ourselves in that Fibonacci spiral. Start at the shoulder, start at the throat. We can do that over and over and over again for the rest of our lives because that particular spiral of genetic memory tunneling is going to happen differently in every place in our body and every place in our memory.  

One of the great riches of being a writer that we get to keep doing that and then hold ourselves up against a mirror of another topic and be like, Oh! I’m going to do this through trees. I’m going to do this through unhoused populations in my current county. I’m going to look at this justice issue or this hopeful issue or this whatever issue or this gender issue or sexuality issue. There’s so many ways we can do that.  

It was really difficult to be a poet writing a memoir when my impulse was to write an essay collection. I ended up with something halfway in-between. It’s this weird, amorphous beast that the commercial world probably won’t love, but I’m hoping that people will read it and say, Oh! This is the kind of memoir I’ve been wanting to read.  
 
AC: Going back to the music and poetry connection, if you were going to make a playlist to accompany your collection, what songs would be on it? 

MJZ: I did make a playlist for the book! It has “Walk of Life” by Dire Straits, “Love Shack” and Tiffany’s “I Think We’re Alone Now”—a lot of songs that belong to my sister and me, since the book is dedicated to Raine (my sister). It’s also got the Talking Heads, Counting Crows and Cookie Monster’s “C is for Cookie” because in the chapter in La Pine, Oregon, when it was too cold to walk to the outhouse at night, my family had a pee bucket. And we would sing, to the tune of “C is for Cookie,” pee in a bucket is good enough for me. When I get to that song, I just crack up laughing. It’s pretty emblematic of my sister and me, as siblings, and of how so much of this book is borrowing structures and irreverently destroying them with our own family cultural narratives.  

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Anna Chotlos is a writer from Madison, Wisconsin. Her essays and poems have appeared in CRAFT Literary, Pinch, HAD, Split Lip, Hotel Amerika and elsewhere. She earned her PhD from the University of North Texas and is a visiting assistant professor at Ohio University.