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.
“Raised by Ferns” will be released Tuesday, March 3. Jewell Zeller will host a launch party at the West Central Abbey on March 12 at 6:30 p.m.
SPR’s Eliza Billingham sat down with Jewell Zeller before the book’s release this week.
This is an extended version. To hear a shorter version, listen to last week's Inland Journal. Both versions have been edited for clarity and length.
ELIZA BILLINGHAM: 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.
EB: And the form you chose is really interesting because, to me, it’s between forms. Can you talk about what the actual pages look like, the different things that are contained on a page? If that comes from poetry or where this kind of--I think of it as a collage or puzzle that you're putting together--can you explain that a little bit and explain how it came about?
MJZ: You said between forms and for listeners who haven't read the book or held the book, it's a memoir and it has a through line arc like a memoir would.
It has a central character with some internal tension and various points of peripety throughout the book and an untidy conclusion. It's more like an indie film than more than it is, you know, a Hollywood memoir.
And it's also a collection of essays. So those two forms you're talking about are it's it has an arc and then it also each individual chapter stands alone as an essay. And each individual essay is doing something different with shape and form.
So, if you've heard of Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola's description of hermit crab form, hermit crab form is named after the hermit crab, which is born without a shell. And in order to exist, it has to find a new home for its body so it can grow.
So hermit crabs will live in doll heads. They will live in pieces of trash in the ocean or they will crawl into other animals shells and their body otherwise is soft and exposed. But inside of the shape that already exists, that they've reclaimed, that they've scavenged, that they've collaged, right, they live.
And so a hermit crab essay borrows existing shapes for vulnerable material to live inside. And the very first one in the book, there are several of these kinds of I would say these are hermit crab-adjacent. I call them collage essays, so I'm really happy you said that. Some people would say they're braided. Some of them are braided forms. Some are hermit crab forms. Most of them are collage with hermit crab tendencies.
So the first essay in the book takes HOA or homeowners association covenants—so, the rules by which you must live in this HOA. Anyone who's lived in an HOA knows it's basically a soap opera. If you get really involved, is drama everywhere. There are people who are involved in the government and people who are not and people who don't care about the rules and break them intentionally. And then they get, you know, sanctioned for doing that. People have to pay dues.
But the idea of a homeowner owner's association as a container was very humorous to me because I didn't come from neighborhoods with rules. I didn't come from homeownership. And that container of rules becomes something against which the essays narrative is written.
So there's a rule, there's a narrative and then there's a rule and then there's a narrative and then there's a rule. And they interspersed throughout and the sections of scene and narrative but up against them.
I'm very interested in resisting structures, resisting patterns. So the book is written in a series of essays that take on different shapes.
And then I'll list some of the other ones really quickly just as examples. One is a sestina, which is a poetic form that has six sestets and a tercet at the end, an envoy and a repeating set of six inwards. But I took that poetic form and turned it into an essay shape. So one is an essay that's a modification of a sestina.
One is a series of, again, narratives that are interwoven in between the USDA fire codes because I'm writing about poverty and climate change and fire and the West burning down.
And then there are a whole bunch of others. There's one that takes SAT test questions and weaves them in between narrative. And eventually it ends on a section being shaped like an extended SAT question, but with infinite options.
So before I give away too much more of the book, I'll just say there are many shapes in the book and they're meant to be playful and serious ways to move between the levity of how awesome it is to disagree with structures--and the gravity of how serious it is to live inside those structures when most of the structures of this world, most of the systems of privilege and power are inadequate for or don't serve most of the people who live within them.
EB: One more question about form. You mentioned this when the man who is the partner in your book tells you that you were homeless as a kid. And obviously you bristled at that. Did you think at all about unreliable narrators?
Because I think there's a point where you explore if your parents were unreliable narrators. Did you try to be a reliable narrator or something else entirely?
MJZ: The question of reliability in nonfiction and specifically in memoir nonfiction is interesting to me. And the entire book does play with emotional truth versus fact. And a memoir, right, memoir comes from the root means memory.
So in a memoir, a person is writing from memory about their life and the literary rules of what you're allowed to say and what you're not allowed to say are a little bit looser, they're a little bit more amorphous than you would get in journalistic reporting.
So if I were writing an autobiography, I would need to fact check every single moment. In memoir research and how you confirm details are real is often through interview. And so you're interviewing other people on their versions of the story.
I was actually really concerned with telling a story that was reliable to my experience. And so I tried in the book to be really clear when I was doing what what a lot of memoirists call “perhapsing.”
So there's this genre of nonfiction, speculative nonfiction. This isn't speculative nonfiction, but it has a few moments where if you are a student of the genre of literary nonfiction, you can see that I'm questioning the genre of literary nonfiction and the ability of any narrator to be reliable.
My birth story was a mythic story that was true, that was told to me by my mother, and I default on principle to believing women when they tell us their stories. I didn't know that when I was two or four or seven or 10, but by the time I was 16, I was pretty certain that I was falling into the camp of always believe women when they tell their stories.
And my mother's story about birth involved me being born under a full moon. When I was writing this memoir and trying to figure out my reliability, something I could easily fact check was the tide schedule and the full moon for the date that is my birthday. And what I learned through research is that the moon wasn't full when I was born. The night I was born, the moon was gibbous. It was a gibbous moon.
So then I had to ask myself which parts of that story are wrong. And I did not want to challenge my mother's birth story, her mythic truth that she had lived, that had lived inside her body. You know, I'm in my 40s and when I was researching these details a few years ago, I didn't want to challenge that.
So where I landed instead, and I say this in the book, is that it's possible my birth certificate is wrong. Because why should I believe a birth certificate, a piece of paper that's issued by a government that we maybe can't trust, over my mother's story?
And what I came to understand was, about my mother was, my mother was carrying a lot in her role as an unconventional parent who chose a path that was not normative, and my birth certificate didn't exist until I was two years old. So maybe the moon was full and my birthday is wrong.
You know, I'm interested in the ways that we cast and recast fact, and lots of facts are wrong, and my mother's story has to be real. I cut my teeth on that story. The myth of my birth is ocean, moon, tides, midwives, blankets, salt air, gull cry, moon. And that's true.
So the unreliability, the unreliability of myself as a narrator in this book that you're pointing to, I think is more about questioning whether factual government stamped truth is more important than a person's story.
And I would argue, and I think I argue pretty thoughtfully without saying it directly in claim, that what's real and what's true and what we live and what informs the fibers of our being is somewhere in between all of that. And every story has gray area. And an unreliable narrator that we construct intentionally might be because the system doesn't allow us to be fully real.
EB: You talk a little bit in the book about feeling guilty about decisions that you've made now living in an HOA, or having a garage door opener, or having a garage. A little tidbit for the listener–before we turned the microphones on, Maya and I were talking and Maya just said, ‘Oh, I'm done with shame. I'm done with it.’
And I wonder how true that is, especially as you're going through these different systems or you kind of have a foot in a mainstream experience and a not mainstream experience and the shame that can come from feeling like you're not doing something right on either way.
Have you navigated yourself out of that shame or guilt? Is it still a part of you? Do you think it should be?
MJZ: This is like, you know, I feel like I'm on Oprah. So I think the answer to this question is sort of twofold. What do I believe about shame in general? And how do I cope with the question of and the false question of scare quotes, “class transcendence,” right?
So in the book, I talk about “privilegeguilt,” like specifically, I use the word “privilegeguilt” as a compound word. I don't want to say I coined it, but I haven't seen anyone else use “privilegeguilt” as a word. And I think it's really easy to get stuck in privilegeguilt and say, ‘Well, I feel bad because I have things that other people don't have.’
And do I still navigate that? Yes. Every day, every day. And I have conversations with my children every day about what our privileges are.
I don't spend a lot of time in shame. I try to spend a lot of time in the impetus to action. So in the essays, when I talk about privilegeguilt, it's interesting. I don't feel the way that I felt at the moment of writing that essay anymore. I feel more, I don't want to say empowered, but I feel an impetus toward empowerment to take action from the roles that I hold.
So what that looks like and the way that that shame has left me is, I try–and again, I don't, I'm not going to virtue signal in this–I'm just going to say I try to do my best to actively participate in changing systems.
So I'm an educator and I spend a lot of time in the classroom talking about those systems and providing resources for learning more about ourselves. And I don't want what I don't want is for my students with privilege, or my children who have some privilege, to walk around the world feeling shame because they were born with something that not all of their peers access. Instead, I would like them to have a sense of gentle, tender responsibility and to do something to try to redistribute resources.
The arc of the book is you see the narrator grappling with the various privileges that she feels she has and realizing that she doesn't have as many as she thinks she has more than she used to. And then she's still navigating a lot of things that by the end of the book, she loses some of those. Some of the access that she thinks she has in the beginning is very tenuous. And that's one of the wrestling tensions of the book is what is privilege and not necessarily in terms of money.
EB: Because there's a line in the book that says–you say something about the privilege of living “where dirt isn't covered in concrete,” which I think you're pointing to the privilege of not growing up in the suburbs. Something like that. What are ways to define privilege other than having money or not?
MJZ: I think it's easy to talk about privilege in terms of money and power. It's also easy to forget that standing barefoot on grass is a privilege or standing barefoot in mud is a privilege. And I don't want to enact a lens of, ‘Oh, you're lucky if you get to live on dirt.’ Like, that's not what I'm saying.
I'm saying you're lucky if you get to access the earth. If you get to have a relationship. We throw around words like sustainability and regenerative and et cetera, et cetera. And I think a deep, intentional relationship with the natural world is the greatest privilege that any of us could have.
My childhood had a lot of that. I had a lot of access to forest spaces, to public lands and to private lands, on which as a child I trespassed with abandon because I didn't understand, you know, financial or county geographies, the way that I understood the world, the way that an animal understands it.
So in the book, the title obviously is “Raised by Ferns.” And one of the jokes in the book is that I joke with my then-husband. I joke that I don't understand American systems because I was raised by ferns. I hope that the book values and carries the ways that there are lots of gaps in our system.
And one of those is that we don't have access to the natural world for everyone. And I would champion that as an access point above a lot of other things. I mean, I think everyone should be housed. Everyone should be fed and clothed. And everyone should have access to green spaces.
EB: And you spend a lot of time in the classroom with students of various privileges. I bring that up because I think this next question came from–I should have written down the line that made me think of it, but I think it came from your experience in a classroom with students who maybe didn't realize that you guys came from different socioeconomic backgrounds.
Do you think having more money makes it harder to be empathetic to people in general, or especially to people who don't have that much money?
MJZ: Gosh, that's another really fun question. I don't actually think I can answer it fully. I've never had a lot of money. I've always been either working class or working middle class. And so without excess finances, I haven't really experienced that.
The people I know who have more money or less money, I don't witness. And again, I think it would be interesting to do a sociological study on this. But I don't think that you can–I don't think that people with money don't have empathy. I think that there are people with empathy across all social strata. I think it's more about accessing arts and literacy.
I think people with more access to arts are more empathetic. And that statistically is true. And that's why it's really important to have conversations and read and participate in all of the cultural activities that school systems and libraries and community centers and public radio provide.
And that's why we need public radio and public libraries. I don't think that it's about having money. I think it's about having access to ideas.
EB: Then I want to ask you about this Thoreau quote that you threw in at a point that I wasn't expecting it. And it kind of stopped me in my tracks. And I don't know if this is like asking someone to explain the punchline of a joke in a way that's, like, really not fun.
But you throw this Thoreau quote in that says, “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.” What is he talking about? Why did you put that in?
MJZ: It comes from the conclusion of his book Walden. And if you've read Henry David Thoreau and you're a Thoreau scholar, you know you kind of have to take everything in Walden with a fist of salt.
Henry David Thoreau said at the beginning of Walden, “I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately and not when I came to die realize I had not lived.” That's a really bad paraphrase. But he basically says that he went to the woods because he didn't want to live among the detritus of capitalism.
And this was you know, this was one hundred fifty hundred seventy years ago. So when you think about Thoreau already recognizing things like, “We do not ride upon the railroad. It rides upon us,” or “We have become tools of our tools”--those are things that Thoreau said.
And one of the things that he said that I always found beautiful early on in reading him when I first read Thoreau–I think when I was 17 or 18, so I was just encountering poverty studies, didn't even really know what it was and was just realizing that I grew up in poverty because I didn't know that when I was a child.
And when he said “Cultivate poverty like a garden herb,” I found it comforting because I thought, ‘Oh, good.’ This is one way that literature reaffirms rather than casting shame or a research eye on my youth.
And so I first found that quote comforting. Reading Henry David Thoreau, I was comforted that someone would choose–like my parents had chosen–to live outside of the systems.
When he says that in the conclusion, he's giving–you know when you read an argumentative essay, like an essay that's an argument and you propose or reveal a social problem, you're supposed to end on some step of action. If you're writing an argument essay for a class, for example. His call to action is to “cultivate poverty like a garden.”
Not in the sense of not having what you need, but in the sense that something very small, like a sprig of sage contains a lot of flavor. So poverty, like living simply–live simply that others may simply live, right? If you can live on less than there's more for everyone else.
So cultivating an herb garden, for example, in a tiny pot on your balcony in your apartment could give flavor to a lot of your life. You don't have to have whatever it is that takes you far, far into the other reaches where you access herbs.
But I think that cultivating poverty like a garden herb is, what can you have around you? That's the few things that you need that give you pleasure and joy and give value to your life, give meaning to your life.
