Maya’s work often blurs genres, working across modes and styles that might be classified as lyric, narrative, hybrid, memoir, flash, linked, speculative, and experimental.
SELECTED NONFICTION
Her memoir-in-essays, RAISED BY FERNS, is now out from Porphyry Press!
Raised by Ferns was runner-up in the 2022 Sue Silverman Prize for Creative Nonfiction from AWP, and an essay from the collection was listed as a Notable by Vivian Gornick for Best American Essays 2023. The memoir received a starred review from Foreword and Kirkus called it “A lyrical and heart-wrenching exploration of the fragility of privilege and the social systems that protect it.”
Read selected essay/chapters from the memoir:
Humanities Washington blog, condensed version of chapter one: “The Privilege Button”
Cincinnati Review: “Ruin Porn”
The Rumpus: “Complete the Sentence”
Diagram: “Poverty Fires” (this essay also appears in Environmental and Nature Writing, 2nd Edition, Bloomsbury)
Passages North: “Lower Columbia Watershed Haibun”
Bellingham Review: “He Worked As an Electrician. He Enjoyed Television. (His Obituary Was Plain.)”
Guesthouse Lit: “Sestina for Foragers”
“On Libraries and Vans,” blog post in Erin Pringle’s Summer Library Series
Additional Nonfiction/Hybrid Work:
On the Seawall: “It Was the Sound of a Cloud Looking at Itself” and “Thanks so Much for the Urn“
Brevity Magazine, January 2017: “American Professionals”
High Desert Journal, Fall 2015: “Questions for the Immigrant’s Daughter,” and “After the Birth of My Daughter, I Try to Imagine My Father as a Child,”
Other nonfiction can be found in Gettysburg Review, Willow Springs, Seneca Review, The Normal School, Florida Review, The Pinch, Spark Magazine (the Magazine of Humanities Washington), and the New York Times-reviewed anthology, This is the Place: Women Writing About Home, and elsewhere.
SELECTED FICTION
Selected fiction from Maya’s unpublished collection (seeking a home! is it your press?), “A Few Nondescript Adventures of Some Consequence”:
Another Chicago Magazine: “Antecedarian”
Bellingham Review: “The In-Between”
Booth Journal: “A Few Nondescript Adventures of Some Consequence”
Necessary Fiction: “Sixteen Bios . . . “
Queen Mob’s Tea House: “The Surgery”
Sundog Lit: “Office Man and The Conference”
Menacing Hedge: “Field Trip”
Moss Journal: “Office Girl & University Hero, Chapter One: Change”
Portland Review: “What We Want From Our Superfoods”
More pieces appear in Denver Quarterly, Santa Monica Review, Rock & Sling, & Lilac City Fairy Tales (Towers & Dungeons Anthology), and elsewhere.
SELECTED POETRY
“Tell it to the Birds,” “Ekphrasonnet Adding Gray Hair to the Cauldron,” and “Ekphrasonnet with Contrapuntal Stumble,” three poems, Electric Lit
“Laozi” in Poetry Northwest
“The Pleasure of Ruin” in Willow Springs
“All Morning I Watch God Build Her Nest,” Terrain.org
“How You Put Me On My Back in the Thistles: A(field) Ekphrasonnet” & “The Brain — is Wider Than the Sky —” in Guesthouse Lit
“From the Dictionary of Reclaimed Nouns–Thrashing: (gerund), What Tulips Do,” two poems, Cortland Review
“From the Dictionary of Reclaimed Nouns—Doula: (n), A Professional, Trained in Elegy” & “Barn (n): a thing in a jar” in Menacing Hedge
“On 5 April 1884” in One Hand Clapping (as pdf: . . . )
“spell for their belly buttons/ with a dictionary clogging its windpipe” and “Benediction Remembering Sunrise and Fawn, with a Trip to the Planetarium” in Blackbird
“little spell for kestrel hovering/ for x-ray & mothering” in Underblong
“Dear America” in The Rumpus
“Letter to Tori in December” in Glass Poetry
What Rough Beast.: “Spell for Conjuring Order: Pleuronectiformes,” in What Rough Beast
“Tori Amos Nursing the Pig,” in The Shallow Ends
“Spell for Electron Microscopes/ for Silicate Minerals & Landfills” in Hobart Pulp
“Will You Tape a Big Zero to My Shirt?“, in Sidereal
“A Small Replica of History,” in Matter Monthly
“It Turns Out a Broken Heart” in Rise Up Review
RADAR POETRY SUITE: “This Aurora Has a Crack and is Beginning to Take on Water”
“There Are Two Kinds of People in this World”
“For Danelle, on the
Curving Back Roads of Wahkiakum County, at the Unblemished Age of Sixteen”
(Thanks to Radar for nominating this poem for a Pushcart Prize)
All We Can Hold: Poems of Motherhood: “Neonatal Intensive Care Unit”
Bellingham Review: “A New Kind of Romance” and “I Set My Alarm for 2:52, But They Had the Time Wrong for Us Out Here in the West”
The Compass: “In Art Therapy, They Have Us Sketch Legs”
Dogwood: “Playing Scrabble with Steve and Crystal”
Ecotone: “Socioeconomic”
Florida Review: “Astoria”
High Desert Journal: “Ways to Prevent Adultery, Numbers One Through Six,” “Ways to Prevent Adultery, Numbers Seven Through Nine,” and “Ways to Prevent Adultery, Number Ten”
INK Node:“Craigslist” (first appeared in New Ohio Review) and “When They Scanned My Brain for Love” (first appeared in Lilac City Fairy Tales)
The James Franco Review:“Biological Half-Lives”
Glass: A Journal of Poetry: “Spell Begging to Be Your Gerry Lindgren/ Spell Lying Down on the Job”
Juked: “Still Life with Maternal Instincts”
Kahini: “How She Comes to Understand Her Baptism”
Lost Horse Press (from RUST FISH): “The Rust Fish”
Montana Public Radio: “Goddammit” (first appeared in Rust Fish)
New Ohio Review: “Facing” and “The Woman Who Didn’t Know How” (audio file)
Pank: “Before the River Freezes,” “Hot Streak, Mid-May,” and “Falling”
Prism Review: “Nymphomaniac Dreams of Hell”
Pontoon Poetry: “In those Early Days, the Woman Who Was a Mermaid Dreams of Loneliness”
Rattle: “Why We Can’t Use Roundup On Our Lawn”
Raven Chronicles: “Migration”
Southern Humanities Review: “What She Sees Above Us”
Spoon River Poetry Review: “The Filling”
Squalorly: “Under the Cathedral Tree” and “Trains”
Tahoma Literary Review: “The Oriole Outside My Window Reminds Me” (audio file)
The Far Field (blog of WA State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken): “Honesty” (this poem first appeared in Rattle)
Waywiser Press: “A Mother’s Story” and “Marsupial”
West Branch: “Something Like Singing in the Rain”
. . and elsewhere . . .
See BOOKS for more.
Maya Jewell Zeller 