Ren Cedar Fuller
Finalist for the 2024 Iron Horse Prize for a first book of collected prose
Nominated to Best American Essays in 2024
Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2023
2023 Summer Writing Contest judge for Under the Sun
Writers Book Club podcast about Ren's essay "Naming My Father"
Naming My Father
Under the Sun
2022 Under the Sun
Summer Writing Contest: Winner
My father could look at a loose metal bolt and say if it was a three-eighths or a five-sixteenths, but he could not name his four daughters unless we were lined up by height. He taught my sisters and me to eat corn on the cob left to right, two even rows at a time, like little typewriters. He walked as though his head were tied to an overhead cable. When my mother asked my father if he remembered her friend, Marjorie, he asked, “The one with symmetrical moles?”
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Resurrecting My Mother's Childhood: A Thematic Analysis
New England Review
Soon after Alzheimer’s began to change my mother, as though a fairy had twinkled a wand, I realized she was happy. When we walked arm in arm, she sometimes took a little hop.
“If you look up at the blue, you can hear the moon with me,” Mom said while we strolled through the garden one day at her assisted living center.
I began scribbling her words in a spiral-bound notebook, typing them when I got home, and emailing the transcript to my research team—by which I mean my sisters.
Published December 2023, Vol. 44, No. 4
Available HERE
I Am The Dippy Bird
North American Review
2022 Terry Tempest Williams Prize
for Creative Nonfiction: Finalist
My water bottle is covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act. I could legally carry it through a TSA checkpoint, though I would not trust the blue-shirted agents to believe my laminated card.
“I have Sjögren’s,” I could tell them, without expecting them to know the foreign-sounding word. If they took away my bottle, my mouth would start to blister and my throat would start to stick. Would the agents think my coughing was pretend?
Read the rest of this essay HERE or purchase
North American Review's Spring 2023 issue HERE
Checklist For a
Sign-Making Party
Hippocampus Magazine
“Can I have people over to make signs on Saturday?” Indigo called from the staircase. Saturday was the Seattle Women’s March of 2017.
“Of course,” I said, putting down my laptop and rising from the daybed. “Does that mean you’re going without me and Dad?”
“You can come,” they said. Indigo is nonbinary. That day, their head was shaved on one side with long wavy hair on the other, colored its natural brown.
My high schooler turned away, willing to march but not chitchat with me.
Read the rest of this essay HERE