Overview

Born in a Pacific Northwest gas station to itinerant, countercultural parents, Maya Jewell Zeller came of age in a landscape where poverty, wildness, and self-reliance intertwined. Raised by Ferns traces the path of a feral girl craving both freedom and safety to a middle-class adult life shaped by academia, motherhood, and uneasy privilege. Refusing tired narratives of bootstrap triumph, Zeller instead renders rural America with intimate complexity. She writes with sharp lyricism and attention about what it means to live between worlds-material scarcity and cultural wealth, inherited distrust and institutional legitimacy. From leaking rentals to library stacks, from ferns and fire codes to scholarship and marital strife, Zeller's life resists easy packaging yet finds form in layered essays that explore the complicated pursuit of belonging. Raised by Ferns offers a vital, compelling new take on the forces that shape identity and the choices that define home. It is a story of survival, but more importantly, of questioning for what-and who-it is worth surviving for.

Full Product Details

9781736755877

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Lovely, vital writing that challenges and makes personal the tired conceptions and biases we have about poverty."" -JESS WALTER, author of The Cold Millions ""A luminous meditation on growing up with empty pockets but a heart full of wildflowers, this memoir wanders barefoot through forests, riverbeds, and verses, gathering wisdom like stones. It's not about what was lacked, but what was found-in nature, in language, and in the quiet, never-ending act of becoming. I can't stop thinking about this book."" -JAMIE FORD, NYT bestselling author of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet ""This is a memoir unparalleled for its intelligence, its poetry, its self-awareness, its generosity, its critique of defined boundaries and binding definitions. No book has so thoroughly changed me as this one did."" -SHARMA SHIELDS, author of The Cassandra

Author Information

Maya Jewell Zeller's work has appeared in The Rumpus, Brevity, and the New York Times-lauded anthology This is the Place: Women Writing About Home. Her recent books include out takes/ glove box, which Eduardo Corral selected as winner of the New American Poetry Prize; and the nonfiction title, The Wonder of Mushrooms. Maya teaches poetry and nature writing for Western Colorado University's low-residency MFA program, and writing across genres for Central Washington University's Professional and Creative Writing Program. She lives with her two teens, two tuxedo cats, and ever-expanding library of books in Spokane and Ellensburg.

Tab Content 6

Countries Available