Today's headlines:
- A business leader, a politician and a farmer all react to the latest developments in global tariffs.
- Rural northeastern Washington will see expanded health services soon, including dental and behavioral health care.
- East Valley School District will bring its $220-million bond back to the ballot in April.
- Democrats in Olympia are quickly moving an income tax for the state's highest earners through the legislature.
Plus, Maya Jewell Zeller has spent most of her life trying to avoid telling her story publicly. She bristles at the suggestion she grew up homeless. But clamors for her personal insights on class, wealth, and privilege forced her to reconsider.
In her debut memoir “Raised by Ferns,” the Spokane poet, author, and educator uses ocean tides and exploding road kill to explore what poverty is—and who gets to define it.
SPR’s Eliza Billingham sat down with Jewell Zeller before the book is released next Tuesday, March 3. The author will host a launch party at the West Central Abbey on March 12 at 6:30 p.m.
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SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting contributed by Eliza Billingham, Anna King, Monica Carrillo-Casas, Owen Henderson and Sarah Mizes-Tan.
Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
Owen Henderson hosts and produces the show.
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TRANSCRIPT
[THEME MUSIC]
OWEN HENDERSON: From Spokane Public Radio, it’s SPR News Today.
I’m Owen Henderson. It’s Wednesday, February 25, 2026.
On today’s show, with the U-S Supreme Court’s recent decision to strike down many of President Trump’s tariffs, we’ll hear reactions from across the Inland Northwest.
And Democrats in Washington’s legislature are quickly ushering through an income tax for the state’s highest earners. We’ll look at the timeline for passage and implementation.
Plus, a conversation with a Spokane poet, author, and educator. Maya Jewell Zeller talks about her less-than-conventional upbringing and new book.
Those stories and more, coming up on SPR News Today.
[FADE OUT THEME]
When the U-S Supreme Court ruled last week that import tariffs levied by the president were illegal, leaders across the Inland Northwest celebrated.
SPR’s Eliza Billingham reports on two of those reactions.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: Ed Schweitzer, the founder of Schweitzer Engineering Labs, called last Friday “Liberation Day.”
ED SCHWEITZER: “I knew it was coming. I really knew that the Supreme Court was going to do the right thing. Although I would never bet on men in robes.”
EB: Schweitzer said in spite of the president’s intentions to protect American manufacturing, the opposite happened to his company.
ES: “We have a fair amount of components that are made in other countries that were tariffed. So we had to increase our prices. And that makes us less competitive. So his tariffs hurt the very manufacturing industry he purported to somehow help.”
EB: Spokane mayor Lisa Brown had signed on to Washington Governor Bob Ferguson’s amicus brief to the court that challenged the tariffs.
LISA BROWN: “Economists generally accept that tariffs are taxes, ultimately, and that they can fall on businesses and consumers. So on behalf of small business, larger businesses, and those of us who are paying the bills in Spokane, we are happy to hear that the Supreme Court has decided that this is a congressional prerogative, not a presidential prerogative.”
EB: Brown said she believes the court still left a door open for the administration to impose tariffs in certain circumstances. President Trump promptly reinstated lower global tariffs without going to Congress.
I’m Eliza Billingham, reporting.
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OH: Because President Trump announced new tariffs late last week, Northwest farmers are now scrambling to make sense of what that means for their spring crops.
Northwest Public Broadcasting’s Anna King reports from a southeastern Washington farm.
ANNA KING: Steady rain drips on long strips of plastic. Soon melon seedlings will be planted.
[RAIN ON PLASTIC MULCH AMBI]
Alan Scheiber, head of the Washington Asparagus Commission, points out mown-down asparagus ferns just steps away. The ground will be tilled soon in prep for the new spears.
[WALKING THROUGH FERNS AMBI]
He says if the tariffs stick, the domestic asparagus market could really shift.
ALAN SCHEIBER: “It has the potential to help the domestic industry in the short term, but it is disruptive to the marketplace.”
AK: He says foreign competition means farmers often ship out of the region. They might not need to this year.
[BIRD SONG, FARM AMBI]
I’m Anna King.
OH: The tariffs went into effect yesterday.
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Health care services for rural residents in northeast Washington will expand in the next few years under a new project.
NEW Health has announced plans to add to its site in Chewelah with dental and in-person behavioral health services.
Mayor Lindsay Baxter says this expansion will help add jobs and bring adequate health care to the rural community.
LINDSAY BAXTER: “Myself and our city administrator have been involved quite a bit in the discussions, making sure that we're removing barriers to make it as easy as possible for NEW Health to accomplish their goal.”
OH: NEW Health was initially going to remodel a former middle school for the space, but it’s pivoted in the face of rising renovation costs and structural limitations.
Instead, the organization has purchased land on the south end of town for the proposed new site.
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East Valley School District is again asking voters to OK a bond issue.
The district’s board voted unanimously last night to approve sending the 220-million-dollar proposal to the ballot again.
Earlier this month, the Spokane Valley school district got more than 50 percent of the vote on the bond, but failed to get the supermajority required for approval.
The proposal would pay to replace decades-old middle and high schools.
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Washington state's historic income tax proposal is moving swiftly through the Legislature.
The measure would put a 10% tax on incomes over a million dollars.
Olympia reporter Sarah Mizes-Tan tells us what to expect.
SARAH MIZES-TAN: “So right now, the bill is being considered in the House, and the hope is that if passed out of the House it'll head to the governor's desk to sign by March 13. But the bill itself is not going to take effect and begin to bring in revenue till 2029. In the meantime, opponents say there will be legal challenges if the governor passes this bill. And they'll likely put it to Washington residents as a ballot initiative this November.”
OH: Democrats are calling the bill a millionaires’ tax.
They say revenue it generates would fund state services and grant tax breaks for lower-income people and businesses.
Republicans say they fear a tax on the richest residents would prompt high earners to move out of state.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
Maya Jewell Zeller might say she grew up feral. Or she grew up unconventionally. She wouldn’t say she grew up homeless.
In her debut memoir “Raised by Ferns,” the Spokane poet, author, and educator uses ocean tides and exploding road kill to explore what poverty is—and who gets to define it.
SPR’s Eliza Billingham sat down with Jewell Zeller before the book’s release next week.
EB: Well, Maya, the first thing that struck me is in the first few pages of the book, you talk about when you were in college, you didn't want to tell people about your childhood because you didn't want to answer questions like, how did you escape poverty? So why did you write a memoir?
MAYA JEWELL ZELLER: So I began my writing career as a poet.
And people in Spokane who know me as a writer know my books of poems and probably know me as a community organizer and educator and friend of the literary and music and visual arts in town.
I wrote a memoir because I had been writing about my life. I write pretty autobiographical poetry, even though I sometimes adopt personas.
And even though I also write fiction and invent characters—my characters in fiction are really wacky. They're often witches. They're often superheroes.
I write very strange, either surreal or domestic fabulism or magical fiction.
But the memoir happened because the forms of poetry in which I was working, which were shorter form, not long form, couldn't contain all of the narrative that I wanted to express.
And so I started writing essays back in 2015.
The first essay in the book was actually written in 2015 and I started by writing essays to stretch out some of the stories that I wanted to tell, and that in poetry—people would read my poems and say, Maya, this is a really interesting story, but I'm just getting that little crystallized piece of image. And there was a hunger for more storytelling.
I didn't initially think it was necessary to tell more of my story because, as I often felt in college, there's a gaze that happens in the entire world—in Hollywood, in a lot of literature, it's really easy to fall into the trope of, I don't know if I can say this in the air, but poverty porn, ruin porn.
I was afraid of people looking at my life and putting it into the categories that were predetermined for us about social class. And I wasn't interested in being the case study in my college courses in social class.
And so in my education courses—I was studying to be a high school teacher—and in my education classes, in psychology, in philosophy, we often talked about social class, but without the kind of nuance and care around individuals that I would prefer in a classroom.
I reflect on this a lot as a teacher. I reflect a lot on, how does it feel to be a part of the in group? How does it feel to be a part of all the out groups? And I was definitely not the demographic that my professors expected in my education classes.
So I think that part of why I didn't write memoir initially. I didn't want to tell those stories in public. I didn't want to be vulnerable.
The reason that I began writing memoir, began writing essays was the impetus of storytelling. The impetus of the importance of story and testament to lives overcame my shyness creatively.
And I had had children by this point and I had been teaching for a really long time. And I had witnessed the stories that did get shared and the stories that didn't get shared. And mine felt like one that wasn't often shared.
So I started writing essays and people really responded quite positively. And when I first, when the first essay in this book was published, it was 2017, I believe, and it was in a New York Times bestselling anthology of essays about home.
And in my essay, I state that my then partner heard about, heard the stories I told about youth and said, ‘Maya, you were homeless.’
And I did not see myself as homeless. I didn't have the conventional arc that we see in poverty studies. It was unconventional.
My parents were very, very off grid and didn't ascribe to the paradigms of mainstream society in many ways.
And so when he said that, I kind of, you know, bristled. And since then, I've come to understand and really think deeply about the various ways that unhoused populations exist.
So when we say unhoused, when we say homeless, when we say in shelters, those all mean different things, but they encompass a group of people that are not served by the socioeconomic stratification of late capitalism.
So I wrote in memoir because that one through line and then the many other spider webs and rhizomes of through lines in the book, I think connect to those intersectional stories around what we have and what we don't have and what we can access via the stations that we are born into and the social pre-determinism.
When I was writing this book, I just felt really suddenly pulled into that as a form. It was answering some of my internal needs to share and tell stories and witness.
OH: “Raised by Ferns” will be released next Tuesday, March 3.
Jewell Zeller will host a launch party at the West Central Abbey on March 12 at 6:30 p.m.
You can hear more of this conversation tomorrow at 12:30 on Inland Journal.
[SHORT MUSIC BED]
SPR News Today is a production of Spokane Public Radio.
Reporting today was contributed by Eliza Billingham, Anna King, Monica Carrillo-Casas, Sarah Mizes-Tan and me, Owen Henderson.
I’m also the host and producer. Eliza Billingham provides digital support.
Thanks for listening.
It’s SPR.
