Maya Jewell Zeller’s most recent publication is Raised by Ferns, a memoir-in-essays released by Porphyry Press (March 2026.) Raised by Ferns details how Maya became a creative, a writer, and an advocate for the wild. She now lives in Ellensburg and Spokane, Washington with her children. She teaches English at Central Washington University, and is Faculty of Poetry and Nature Writing within the low-residency MFA Creative Writing Program at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado. She can be found wandering huckleberry lined trails, gazing up toward towering ponderosa pine trees, and sniffing roses in city botanical gardens. https://mayajewellzeller.com
Poet, author, and frequent reviewer for the South Broadway Press journal, Shelli Rottschafer, recently sat down to interview Maya.
SLR: Dear Maya, thank you for this interview.
I am excited to learn from you about where life has led you and how your path has influenced your writing.
It seems to be clear you have a keen sense of play, especially in how you teach. I have seen this in your collaborative academic text written with Kathryn Nuernberger. At the end of each chapter you both encourage students to experiment, you give “invitations to reflect,” and even provide writing prompts on “remixing nursery rhymes.”
Can you talk about the importance of play in writing?
MJZ: Thank you for underscoring that, Shelli! I am a huge fan of the pedagogy of play. When I taught high school, I used to introduce Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” by reading aloud the children’s book Henry Climbs a Mountain, by D.B. Johnson; and in my in-person poetry classes at the college level, we often begin study of duende with a campus scavenger hunt (spanning art and science buildings and programs). In both cases, play opens up the brain and body to experiment and adventure—two of the aspects of a healthy curiosity that allows learning and growth. In writing—as we know—playing games and making our own rules can sometimes lead to new discoveries. If we approach ‘received forms’ as play—as in a nursery rhyme remix—we can also discover.
SLR: In that co-edited text – Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. NY: Bloomsbury, 2024 you have a chapter on the “Poetics of Spells.” You use that practice in your poetry collection, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (2017). Throughout it you create incantations, you invoke chants, and you weave in textures almost making your words touchable.
How are repetition and sensory details additives in verse?
MJZ: I love it when poets interview poets, spellmakers convene with spellmakers! I know that you also practice repetition and sensory details in your work, so you know: spells are poems and poems are spells; they are small powerful incantations, whether we call them charms or not. Poems make something happen, through repetition and invocation—saying something over and over can feel like summoning or conjuring, and the sensory world translated into verse can make us FEEL it viscerally, as if we are experiencing it. A spell-poem is a translation of desire for, or protection from, the tangible world and its beings.
SLR: Your 2023 collection, Out Takes / Glove Box, which was the winner of the New American Poetry Prize, teaches a unique form of poetry–the Out Take Poem.
Can you explain this inventive form? How do you select your “golden lines”?
MJZ: Yes. Merriam-Webster defines out take as “something that is taken out: such as a : a take that is not used in an edited version of a film or videotape, or b : a recorded musical selection not included in a record album.” In a craft talk I give on this concept, I define out take three ways, the first of which is: “the images, narrative, or other materials behind the poem or the final image; those materials which did not make the printed version, and which may be less formal/ polished/ directly narrative/ contributing to a clear and direct discourse, but which may access a layer of the psyche or subconscious hinted at but not explored in the original image” (Jewell Zeller, “Out Takes From the Making: The Story Behind the Image”). Put simply, a poetic out take is simply taking unexplained or mysterious allusions/ images from a parent-poem, and then unfolding what’s behind them—kind of like giving those images an origin story. My “out takes” were invented when I took a poem I’d written, called “Documentary,” and then pulled images to make seven other poems, the “Out Takes From the Making” of the documentary—like cuts from the final film. That series was first published in Juked in 2017, but folks could also pick up the (2023) book and see how the images scatter through other poems. Thanks for asking about it!
SLR: Both Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (2017) and The Wonder of Mushrooms: The Mysterious World of Fungi (2025)—which is a Foreword Indies 2025 Finalist in the Nature Category, are beautifully illustrated. Alchemy pairs each of your poems with visual artist Carrie DeBacker’s nature-based paintings. The Wonder juxtaposes illustrator Jenny deFouw Geuder’s woodland scenes with your descriptive prose.
How does ekphrasis tell a herstory rooted in m(other) nature?
MJZ: I love that you’re picking up so directly on intersectional feminist undertones, Shelli. So for Alchemy, it was a true collaboration—we sent poems and images back and forth and composed in response to one another’s work. The ekphrastic responses were true makings based from another woman’s work, as well as Lorca’s “deep spirit of the earth” coming up through each other’s art. Then our publisher arranged them for the final draft of the book.
In The Wonder of Mushrooms, it was less ekphrastic and more of an illustration. Jenny and I were both contracted for the book by AdventureKEEN, who also worked with me to set an outline of topics/ phenomena they wanted covered. While Jenny did wait to get the final copy of the word file from me before painting, it was more about illustrating content than making something up in response. So, it was probably more rooted in the earth than in our creating from it—a kind of mycelial response.
SLR: Throughout Raised by Ferns your poetic-lines come through the prose. An example of this is your essay, “Sestina for Foragers” which is a fusion of the haibun with the sestina.
There are other examples of this inventiveness within your writing as well.
Why experiment with different forms?
MJZ: That’s so brilliant. I hadn’t thought of “Sestina for Foragers” as a haibun, but I love that you are making that connection—and of course it is there!— the essay is about place and journey as much as it is about mystery and repetition. I have another essay, that precedes the ones I wrote for this memoir, called “Lower Columbia Watershed Haibun: Field Notes on Going Home Again,” first published in Passages North, that I am sure was a predecessor to “Sestina,” and which didn’t make it into Ferns. So to answer your question, I love it when a received form gives us permission to play in another genre: it’s like a fun puzzle, trying to see what fits and where and how—except that in addition to the already structured edges of the puzzle pieces, you can invent shapes while putting the others together. So there’s a bit of magic in that process. Making a poetic sestina, which repeats six words in a predetermined pattern in six sestets and a final tercet, into six sections and a prose envoi, is like creating that final picture—but with some surprise deviation from the predetermined pattern: like following a map to treasure but remaking the map in the process. It’s another way to discover, to play.
SLR: In the essay “The Privilege Button” in Raised by Ferns, you quote Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. You both call to break with traditions, and in your narrative you use creative leaps to say what is often left unsaid, that liminal space between the lines.
Could you share with us why this resonates with you?
MJZ: Lorca wrote that “In order to live, a metaphor needs two elements: a form, and a radius of action. A central nucleus and the perspective surrounding it. The nucleus opens like the flower that startles us by its strangeness; but within the radius of light we learn the name of the flower, and we get to know its perfume.” In my Advanced Poetry textbook chapter on duende, I wrote: “I think of Lorca’s form as the image or figurative language that carries the concept, and the radius of action as how the metaphor moves in the poem. The startling occurs when we are transformed or transferred through the process so that we are able to experience it synaesthetically and feel its embodiment viscerally—a relationship with image that transports us, as if by magic, what we first felt in art and then spent the rest of our lives attempting to find again and recreate” (Nuernberger and Zeller, Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology). In deep image poetics, this arrives as the mysterious image, such as those in Out Takes. In Ferns, there is an echo of this with the rhizomes brought up throughout the book, and coalescing in the various forms, and later footnotes of the title essay. The leaping of Lorca resonates so deeply with me because I am also made of “thistle and terminal stones” like he references in “Theory and Play of the Duende.”
SLR: Your memoir is a heavy self-gaze. It’s a chronicling from creative youth to creative adult, a herstory of resilience.
In hindsight, what would you tell young Maya now?
MJZ: I think I’d tell her she’s going to face a choice in young adulthood, and she’ll think that one path is the way to stability, to security, but that instead, she could be her own anchor. That she is the stabilizing factor she seeks. I’d tell her to choose herself…. [and that] art isn’t a wildness you have to prune or garden in secret between the things other people need; it’s the wildness you should cultivate by going into it.
SLR: You have relationships with young creatives because you are a mother and an educator.
In our hard times as we face challenges with international conflict, climate change, and juggling to have and to have not,
what could you advise your audience?
MJZ: Shelli, thank you for this beautiful set of scaffolded questions that pay such deep attention to my lineage and canon of work, in our world that pulls us in so many directions. I think my last answer (above), about art and wildness is part of the advice I’d give, but I also think there’s something in advice that is particular to each individual, and to the worlds they inhabit and in which they might create and act to protect others.
So this is [what I would say in] general: make something that gives you joy, and that probably, in that discovery, will also offer joy to others. Make it out of scraps if you can, but don’t think you only deserve cast-off scraps.
And of course try not to use up everything: leave some huckleberries for the bears, and leave some for the next people who come to pick. And remember that you don’t own the land you’re walking on, and that if you do take something, you better give something back. If you feel yourself being erased by someone else, don’t imagine they will color you back in later, or that you don’t deserve to be all the shades of yourself that you are.
SLR: Maya, thank you for reminding us that we all need to make space for others, that we need to pay attention to ourselves, and that all children and animals and plants are sacred. Thank you for gathering upon the page with us here at South Broadway Press.
READ: SHELLI ROTTSCHAFER’S REVIEW OF MAYA JEWELL ZELLER’S RAISED BY FERNS
Shelli Rottschafer (she / her / ella) completed her doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (2005) in Latin American Contemporary Literature. From 2006 until 2023 Rottschafer taught at a small liberal arts college in Grand Rapids, Michigan as a Professor of Spanish. She also holds an MFA in Creative Writing with a concentration in Poetry and coursework in Nature Writing from Western Colorado University (2025).
Shelli’s home state is Michigan, yet her wanderlust turns her gaze toward her new querencia within the Mountain West where she lives, loves, and writes in Louisville, Colorado and El Prado, Nuevo México with her partner, photographer Daniel Combs and their Pyrenees-Border Collie Rescue.
Discover more of Shelli’s work at: www.shellirottschaferauthor.com
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