Interview With Maya Jewell Zeller

May 20, 2026.Reading time 28 minutes.

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.

Interview with Jodie Noel Vinson: Author of “Survival of the Unfit: A Retrospective”

November 14, 2024.Reading time 12 minutes.

By Clare Hickey

Read the essay here!

Clare Hickey: What was the moment you knew that Charles Darwin needed to be a part of this story? Were you familiar with him at all before?

Jodie Noel Vinson: Yeah, I love that you ask about the origins of this essay ’cause. I feel like it really became an exploration of origins. The essay really started with me in the early pandemic. Looking at, you know, this protester who was holding their sign sacrifice the week and kind of realizing I was one of the weak, maybe that they wanted to do away with and thinking, OK How did we get here? You know, and then kind of looking backwards and reflecting and Darwin’s story came into that. To kind of help me explore that question in my own life.

I really knew very little about Darwin’s life when I started the essay. He had been just this kind of iconic, almost stereotypical, even cartoonish, figure in my mind. And one thing I’ve learned in writing and researching, looking at the lives of of folks through the lens of illness, is that it kind of opens up kind of their humaneness and their vulnerabilities. It was really rewarding to learn about him in a more nuanced way. I think it was just really learning about the fact that someone who had studied and talked about and thought about survival of the fittest might himself be unfit. That kind of was the spark for the essay.

Pyrotechnic Poetry: An Interview with Johnny Cate

November 12, 2024.Reading time 11 minutes.

Interview conducted by Cam Kurtz

Cam Kurtz: When was the first time that you were published as a poet?

Johnny Cate: Well, the first time I count was actually not that long ago. I believe it was like last year. It was kind of mid-summer last year. I had three picked up randomly before that, but I’d never read them to anybody, I would never perform them for anybody. It was a small press in Portland or something, but I don’t really count that. I think that was sort of like a fluke thing. So I count my official history of publication as beginning last summer basically. I think it was like last April that I got my first poem picked up.

I started to try [to get published] because I was coming to the end of my MFA, so I was like, okay, I’m going to start transitioning from the work of writing this book or this thesis, into the work of publishing. And that’s when I seriously started to find opportunities and push them out and really get going.

CK: What has it been like as your first year as a published poet?

Interview with Arya Samuelson: Author of “I Am No Beekeeper,” notable in Best American Essays 2024

November 11, 2024.Reading time 14 minutes.

Read the essay here!

By Clare Hickey

Clare Hickey: Congratulations on your essay “I Am No Beekeeper.” It’s been out for a little while now, but it just won Notable in Best American Essays. Has your relationship to the story changed at all since writing it or publishing it?

Arya Samuelson: Yes, definitely! I just read the essay a few weeks ago as part of a performance piece, so it’s fascinating to kind of relive that story all over again – especially with the recent Best American Essays nod. One of the really beautiful things about having this story in the world has been hearing people’s responses. Many people have shared about their own abortion experiences, some of which shared deep parallels to mine and some of which were completely different, but all of which carried a similar kind of lingering potency, especially because we had been carrying these stories in secret.

Since publication, I’ve had the pleasure of being invited into many reading and collaboration spaces centered around subversive motherhood. It’s been so powerful to witness such a spectrum of experiences surrounding the complexities of motherhood and to deliberately bring abortion into that conversation.

Interview with Noah Pohl: Author of “SHASTA GIRL”

November 9, 2024.Reading time 10 minutes.

Read the story here!

Interview conducted by Shelbie Music

Shelbie Music: How did you get into writing? What did that journey look like for you?

Noah Pohl: So I started writing in middle school, it was kind of a creative outlet for me. I was always a big reader growing up and if I had an opportunity to use creativity in something, I would try to do that. I had some really encouraging teachers who helped kind of nurture that. It’s funny ’cause I originally was more into screenwriting than I was into fiction. And when I was growing up, I would buy published screenplays off Amazon and I would just read them and study them. And I later pivoted into fiction. It’s been a long journey, but I like the fact that I can kind of bounce between the two mediums.

Make Sure There Is Breathing Room: A Conversation with Tania De Rozario, author of And The Walls Come Crumbling Down and winner of the 2020 NOR nonfiction contest

November 26, 2021.Reading time 14 minutes.

By Kay Keegan

Kay Keegan: Describe your writing practice and how you sustain it. Has your process changed over the course of your writing career? How about during the pandemic?

Tania De Rozario: I am not a very organized person by nature so I work really hard to set detailed schedules and deadlines for myself because if I don’t have a schedule to look at, I am unable to get anything done. Setting aside daily time for my personal writing becomes part of my overall schedule. That said, I am not one of those people who has output goals. Like I don’t have a word count I need to meet every day. I am actually a very slow writer -slower than most, I think- and I need a lot of time for things to percolate. So in that time that I set aside for my writing, I am not necessarily literally putting words on paper – I could really just be sitting with an idea and dwelling on it and letting it develop in my brain. And when I am blocked, I use that time to do something that activates a different part of my brain (like drawing or baking, for example) so that the writing part of my brain can continue to solve the issues it needs to solve subconsciously without me bothering it. Once things are on paper, I try to make sure there is breathing room between edits – again, this is to let things percolate, and to make sure I come back to the draft with fresh eyes every time. I don’t think my process has changed very much over the course of the pandemic. One thing that has changed over the course of my writing career is that I am now in much less of a rush to get to the “final product” and more focused on giving every piece of work enough breathing room to develop into the piece it wants to be.

Interview with Jeanne-Marie Osterman

May 10, 2021.Reading time 15 minutes.

Eric Stiefel:

I’d like to start by congratulating you on Shellback, which is your first full-length collection of poetry. As a poet who seldom writes so intimately about my personal life, I’m curious to know how you shaped your lived experiences and your father’s wartime memories into such a sharp, multifaceted, character-driven collection of poetry like Shellback. When did you know that these poems would form a book-length project? Did they come to you individually or in groups?

Jeanne-Marie Osterman:

Thanks for your kind words, Eric, and a great question.

My father served in the Navy during World War II, but it wasn’t until he was in his mid-nineties—not many years ago—that he told me he’d fought in the Battle of Okinawa, and that he’d survived a kamikaze attack. I’d just started writing poetry at that time, and was inspired to write a short poem about his revelation. I took it to a workshop and was encouraged by the teacher (Grace Schulman) that I was on to something and to “keep going” with more poems on this topic. And so I did.

When my father told me about the attack, he was in assisted living. I was visiting him a few times a year, from New York City to Everett, Washington, and these visits inspired poems also. We talked about old times, the other residents, how Everett had changed, things we did together when I was a child, and how he felt about facing the end of life. I kept a notebook and started many of the poems after these talks.

Looking for Moments Where the Transcendent Becomes Possible: An Interview with Anthony Marra

April 9, 2021.Reading time 51 minutes.

Featured Image: Murnau, by Alexej von Jawlensky. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art’s Open Access Collection

Anthony Marra is the author of the collection of short stories The Tsar of Love and Techno and the novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction. Our editorial associate Chase Campbell interviewed him in advance of our annual fiction contest, for which Marra is the judge.

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On Ongoingness: A Conversation with Ada Limon and Jaswinder Bolina

November 6, 2020.Reading time 74 minutes.

Moderated by NOR editor, David Wanczyk

David Wanczyk: We’re talking on Zoom today with Ada Limón, author of five award-winning collections of poetry, and Jaswinder Bolina, author of three acclaimed collections and the recent book of essays Of Color. And we’re talking only 16 days after the police shooting of Jacob Blake, when months of predominantly peaceful protests have been met by ever more ominous counterprotest, when our election is threatened by a virus and dishonesty, when we simply miss our friends, and when many of us are even more exhausted than usual; and yet I’m happy to be having this conversation because these are two writers who have given me a clear-eyed bucking-up in the past, who refuse to ignore the struggle, but find—at least seem to find—a kind of dog-chewed, persevering, loveliness and electricity in their work. Even when, as Limón writes, quote “the country plummets into a crepitating crater of hatred, isn’t there still something singing?”

And so I want to ask both of you—How are you? First, but also, how are you as artists listening for what’s still singing? How can we—can we resist what feels like the desperation of our country?

Ada Limón: Hmm. Hmm. Just start there? [laughs]

Jaswinder Bolina: An easy a softball to start, to lead off.

Perpetual Reckoning: An Interview With Kiese Laymon

April 16, 2019.Reading time 37 minutes.

“For me the blues is the perpetual reckoning with what should be agony, but finding ways of making that reckoning pleasurable. The agony and the pleasure exist right up next to one another. The question is how do we most effectively hold ourselves together through the pain, through the suffering, and through the agony? My history in this country teaches me that you have to do it through art. That doesn’t mean the art that gets sold. But the art of talking. The art of listening. The art of making sounds. The art of rhythmically manipulating repetition, which I think was really at the core of the blues.” – Kiese Laymon

Interview conducted by Josh-Wade Ferguson

Obsession, Desperation, and Curiosity: A Conversation on the Poetics of Blues with Tyehimba Jess and Derrick Harriell

March 15, 2019.Reading time 73 minutes.

“And that’s what you’re talking about when you’re talking about the essence of the blues and its relativity to what we’re doing today. Because we’re working in the tradition of the literature, right? That’s inseparable from that stream. That was the literature we had before we could read and write. And once we were allowed to read and write without the force of death being put upon us, all that imaging went right into the literature. And that’s the connection between African American literature and the blues. So there is no separation between the two.” – Tyehimba Jess

Interview Conducted by E.M. Tran

Conversation with Amy Bloom

October 25, 2015.Reading time 9 minutes.

By James Miranda

JM: One of the things I’ve always admired in your fiction is the way you’re able to use taboo and transgression so deftly and intelligently as a source of narrative tension. From your earliest stories in Come to Me (such as the much anthologized “Silver Water” and the gutsy “Sleepwalking”) right up through your complicated protagonist Lillian in Away, or Iris and Rose in your newest book Lucky Us, you seem to have an intense interest in characters that push the bounds of what is socially acceptable. Yet their acting out never feels contrived or overdone. The prohibited takes on a sacredness that’s always palpable and quite beautiful in your writing. Are you conscious of the place that taboo and transgression have in your fiction? Do you find such socially constructed forces to be great fodder for compelling narrative?

AB: I don’t really ever think of myself as breaking taboos and transgressing. It’s also true that although good manners matter to me a lot social norms do not. Good behavior is not usually a subject that fascinates me.

Conversation with Marie Howe

October 25, 2015.Reading time 7 minutes.

By Brad Aaron Modlin

Brad Aaron Modlin: In the past, you have written in the persona of both Eve and Mary the Mother of Jesus. While Eve speaks anachronistically—of driving a car on ice, for example—Mother Mary does not clearly do so. In the new poetry, Mary Magdalene does. When you (re)write a pre-existing character, how do you know when to stick to what we’ve already heard and when to change it? What do you hope to add to these characters?

Marie Howe: Midrash is a form of rabbinic literature, a storytelling that fills in the gaps in stories from the Torah. I always wished that Christian literature encouraged that kind of imagining. Growing up with the characters of Eve, Mary, and Mary Magdalene, I was moved by the deep silences within their stories. These are women in extremity, and also women who go on living, through those extreme states, into days and months and years—as we all do. What is their experience? And what is it the day after? And the day after that?

Many others have written through these voices—Rilke in his “Life of Mary,” W.H. Auden in his Christmas Oratorio called “For The Time Being,” Eliot, and recently so many women have brought their consciousness to these stories: Lucille Clifton, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, many women writers. Each writer receives the poems according to her sensibility.

Interview with Frederick Barthelme

August 30, 2008.Reading time 61 minutes.

By Gary Percesepe

Featured Image: Seated Youth Writing in Book by Raphael

Gary Percesepe: You wrote an essay for the New York Times Book Review in April 1988, back when the “minimalism slash postmodern” discussion in literature was still in vogue. It had a wonderful Veronica Geng title, “On Being Wrong: Convicted Minimalist Spills Bean.” Your essay sparked a lively discussion among academic folk which was published in Critique in 1990 as “Postmodernism: The Uninhabited Word, Critics’ Symposium.” Looking back twenty years later, what has changed, and what remains the same?