English professor’s published memoir met with critical acclaim

About 11 years ago, though she did not know it at the time, Central Washington University English Professor Maya Jewell Zeller wrote what would become the first essay in her latest published work, a prosaic memoir called Raised by Ferns, which was released March 3.

The essay, “The Privilege Button,” explores the unique feeling of moving from an almost nomadic childhood into something resembling modern suburban life, complete with a button that makes the garage open on its own. Jewell Zeller describes this essay as being key to the body of work that would eventually become Raised by Ferns, a nonlinear collection of essays about, among other things, growing up in working class poverty and navigating a career acculturated in the middle class.

“One of the big things I’m interested in interrogating is America, and our sense of who does and does not belong,” she said. “The very first essay introduces that privilege button, but it also introduces my childhood, which was spent pretty itinerant. And while I don’t identify as a person who was unhoused, in some ways I was.” 

In 2018, Jewell Zeller realized what it was she was writing and started dedicating more time to the project. A sabbatical and an extended trip to Oxford University in 2024 gave her the perspective she needed to put the final touches on her sixth book.

“I was able to pull away from my life and go into research on natural history, fleshing out the character in my novel-in-progress,” she said. “That helped me look at the memoir with fresh eyes and go back to that arc of my child self with some distance and some cross-genre research that let me figure out exactly what I was doing with it.”

The key issue she had to overcome was deciding how to connect the narrative between the nonlinear vignettes from her life that made up the book.

“Anyone who’s worked on a memoir knows that you sort of have to figure out what your through-line is, and it’s not always what you think you were going for,” Jewell Zeller said. “Using the sabbatical to get some geographical distance between me and the things going on in my personal life helped me find that.”

The structure of the work reflects Jewell Zeller’s own lived experience, weaving in and out of different eras of her life with deep intentionality.

“It would be easy to market this as a book about a feral child who grows up to be a college professor, but the arc of it is a lot more complicated than that,” she said. “Because I come from the poetry world, the book moves in time from the very beginning, exploring the various selves I’ve inhabited outside of the order in which I lived them. The book invites the reader to interrogate those various aspects of themselves, and what they might be carrying with them.”

Once she had completed the manuscript, she set about securing a publisher, which she found in Porphyry Press, based out of a remote dry-cabin in McCarthy, AK. Jewell Zeller is overjoyed that the Alaska-based publisher’s care and attention brought the book over the finish line and into the hands of the public.

“The biggest feeling I have when I have a book come out is gratitude,” she said. “To reference past metaphors, a book is like the mushroom fruit of a mycelial network. I’m the author of the book, but there’s so much more that goes into it, including an attentive, amazing, and deeply thinking publisher, along with a network of writers and artists and incredible people in the community around it.”

Raised by Ferns has already been critiqued in the seasonal review issue of Foreword magazine, earning a coveted “star” rating that is only awarded to a handful of the thousands of submitted works. The review praises Jewell Zeller’s ability to paint a lush picture of the world that surrounded her as a child. The memoir has also been praised in The Spokane Spokesman-Review, on NPR, and on Kirkus Reviews.

“Earthy images of nature abound, as with passages about mossy, fern-covered hills that include depictions of the weeds and berries that Zeller’s family gathered from fields for dinner,” Kristin Rabe wrote for Foreword. “Raised by Ferns is an ingenious memoir-in-essays that recalls a lifetime of determination.”

Jewell Zeller wrote Raised by Ferns with support from CWU and the Washington State Artists Trust. As she sees it, producing good art is just one of the many ways the world needs to rise above challenging times like the ones we are currently facing.

“Before you go write a book, first plug yourself into your community and see who around you needs help,” she said. “I believe that both art and action are necessary in this moment.”