Flourish and Rot: Alumna Maya Jewell Zeller publishes memoir ‘Raised by Ferns’

Maya Jewell Zeller (’02 English) writes in her memoir “Raised by Ferns” that she was “born in a gas station on the Oregon Coast in 1979” where her parents “paid the midwives with blankets and gasoline.” 

From that moment, Zeller navigated her life from a wild child roaming fields and forests and wading in tidepools, living in vans and campgrounds and weathered farmhouses to becoming a college professor in a suburban house with a garage door she could open with a remote, an HOA membership, and a career teaching in the very higher education institutions — Gonzaga and Central Washington University — she once imagined closed to her. 

“When I was a freshman in college English, honors, and humanities courses, I always felt like I was trespassing on someone else’s land,” she writes. 

As a professor, she is sympathetic to students who struggle with the kinds of challenges she did in her school years: poverty, lack of access, health issues. She fights for those students by spending time on her breaks, during her vacations, on long weekends, as she writes letters of recommendation, helps with graduate school applications and assists students with career development.

But when she reflects on her own experience, she doesn’t remember herself as homeless, nor does she judge her less privileged students for not having easy knowledge of higher education’s culture.

“When I apply my own gaze to my experiences, I don’t look down on them. I don’t see myself as transcendent now; I see myself living another version of my life. And I see my sister — who decided college wasn’t for her and went on to manage five UPS Stores — as equally successful,” she writes. 

“‘Raised by Ferns,’ is, in one sense, about the complications of moving from a culture of poverty into a culture of education,” Zeller said. “It’s also about the systems that perpetuate privilege by someone who feels alienated by those systems. Being an educator, being a mom, learning foreign languages, parenthood, climate change, abuse and survival — my background and the discordance with privileged life makes me never really feel safe.”

As a kid, Zeller spent long hours in public libraries and bookmobiles that visited her rural communities, reading and contemplating the world through books. 

“And I learned that the existence of libraries and books, and what happens in spring with dormant sticks turning to blossoms and leaves, means there is always a future, and you can hold the past inside yourself like a little doll,” she writes.

Zeller applied to only one college — Western — and was accepted. With scholarship help from Western, unshakable determination and a stellar academic record despite going to three different high schools in four years, she left the nomadic, spare world of vans, trailers, campgrounds, and apartments attached to her father’s flailing businesses and moved to Bellingham. 

At Western, she fell in love with creative writing. 

“When I started college, I wanted to be a high school English teacher,” she said. “But I didn’t understand anything about university structure, culture, career paths … I didn’t know what a major was. I had to learn so much.”

English Professor Laura Laffrado was a mentor of Zeller’s and remembers her fondly.

“Maya ranks as one of the most talented undergraduate students that I have ever taught. Though I have taught many (many!) students since Maya walked Western’s campus, she stands out for her amazing gifts in reading, writing, and thinking,” Laffrado said.

It was in her creative writing pursuit that Zeller met Jeremy Pataky, ’01, B.A, English, creative writing. Jeremy Voight, ’01, B.A. English started Arbutus, an online literary journal with Pataky, Zeller, and their friends.

“We would do this deep, close reading of poems. I would spend two hours reading five poems with people who were the kind of people WWU attracts: students filled with curiosity and depth of thinking who are engaged in learning not out of obligation but out of genuine passion,” she said. 

Pataky, author of a poetry collection “Overwinter," is the founding publisher of Porphyry Press in Alaska. He lives on a formerly abandoned homestead in Alaska in a cabin he built. 

“We are a true micropress, publishing about two books a year,” he said. “My first exposure to publishing was with the Bellingham Review at Western.”

As they graduated and moved from Bellingham, Pataky eventually landed in extremely rural Alaska, and Zeller, after teaching high school on the Olympic Peninsula, moved to Spokane for graduate school (she now splits her time between Spokane and Ellensburg). But Pataky kept an eye on Zeller, reading the poems she was publishing, following her teaching, writing and publishing career. Zeller knew Pataky was out there still working in literature. She read his work and cheered him on, but they weren’t often in touch.

When Zeller completed her memoir, she sent it to publishers, large and small, including her old friend Pataky. She received offers from another publisher, but decided to publish with Porphyry.

“Jeremy is an amazing poet and interesting man. His response was so thorough, detailed and thoughtful,” she said. “He really understood the book and what I had created. He sent a two-page letter that was just beautiful; it was almost like a love letter,” she said.

Pataky was impressed with the way Zeller brought together the natural world, her wild upbringing, climate anxiety and the examination of privilege that rejects either romanticizing poverty or drenching it in shame. 

“The quality of thinking matched the quality of the writing,” he said. “The issues and questions she grapples with in ‘Raised by Ferns’ make up a story that needs to be told, and well told in a way only Maya can,” he said. 

Zeller has published fiction, nonfiction and poetry in four books of her own, numerous anthologies, and several literary quarterlies. 

“Even as an undergraduate English major, Maya was writing with striking imagination and dazzling skill with language. Her great success since Western is no surprise and so well-deserved,” said Laffrado.

To see Zeller in person, go to this link and check for updates.

Go here to order a copy of “Raised by Ferns.”

Go here more information about creative writing and education at WWU.

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Frances Badgett covers the College of Humanities and Social Sciences and the College of Fine and Performing Arts Communications. Reach out to her with story ideas at badgetf@wwu.edu.