offering a craft class at The University of Pittsburgh’s Writing Center on Friday, March 27 from 3:30 until 5:30 p.m. (The Writing Center is located in The O’Hara Student Center, 3rd Floor). She will also be reading as part of the Short Reads Anniversary Reading sponsored by PRoB media partner Autumn House Press on Saturday, March 28 from 7-8 p.m. at White Whale Bookstore in Bloomfield.
Both events are free and open to the public.
Ren Cedar Fuller was in her fifties when her world as a writer began to get bigger.
Back then, Cedar Fuller was working as a teacher and director of a Seattle, Washington preschool. Part of her job included writing newsletters for the parents of her students. The parents, she says, were a tough crowd.
“They’d call me out if I’d, well, obfuscate,” she says, laughing. “I had to figure out how to tell stories about the children that would keep the parents reading. It was great training.”
Great training, especially, for someone who always dreamed of writing a book.
“After college, I’d sit in cafes with my journal. I was in San Francisco then and so of course that’s what I did,” Cedar Fuller says. “But I didn’t know anybody who was a writer. Becoming a writer was a fantasy. A dream.”
Then, years later, the pandemic hit. Cedar Fuller’s preschool went online, and that writing fantasy became real. Cedar Fuller took an online writing class through Seattle’s nonprofit literary arts center, Hugo House. And then she took another. And another.
“I was transformed,” she says.
That transformation resulted in a debut collection of essays, Bigger, which won the 2024 Autumn House Nonfiction Prize. Clifford Thomson, award-winning author and prize judge, called Bigger a gem that offers “the deep pleasure of experiences thoughtfully considered, emotions examined, and ideas explored, yet still left to us to ponder.”
And there is so much to ponder in Bigger.
In this rich and wide-ranging collection, Cedar Fuller, now 62, explores life with an autistic (yet undiagnosed) father, gender diversity, the slippery-ness of truth, being the parent of a trans child, and more. It’s a collection that expands readers’ perspectives and leans hard into empathy at a time when it feels like the world needs it most.
Bigger is one of those books that makes readers’ lives and hearts bigger—the perfect magic of that.
I had the chance to talk with Cedar Fuller via Zoom from her home in Seattle.
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LJ:
I love this passage from “Naming My Father” in which you come to a healing place in your memory of your father, whose strangeness and distance you realize came from him being (undiagnosed, unnamed) on the autism spectrum: “He wanted me to know all the countries in the world, all the stories in his Bible, all the histories he could share. He wanted my world to be bigger, which is what we want for those we love.”
I love that you chose Bigger as the title for this collection, and I love how the book expands worlds for your readers. People aren’t easily labeled or boxed in. A transgender child. A mother who believes in always telling the truth but lies to protect others. The experience of being both sighted and blind. Young women both free and imprisoned in their lovely bodies. The desire to run toward family and run away. The desire to name and to resist naming.
This all seems important stuff, particularly now when the world maybe, but specifically the United States, is so polarized. Can you talk about how your book speaks to our difficult times?
RCF:
I wrote the essays in Bigger between 2021 and 2023, when the pandemic and Black Lives Matter revealed cracks in our society, although the strong polarization we see today had not yet emerged. I thought I was writing stand-alone essays that explored what it felt like to grow up with people who were different from me. My father couldn’t show he loved me in a way I understood; my immigrant mother’s separation from her original home contributed to a decades-long depression; my husband and I raised a gender-diverse child; and I have an autoimmune disease that took away my ability to cry.
When I’d written a dozen essays, half of which had been published in literary journals, I realized each one explored relationships with people who are different from the norm. I hope the message my book offers is that loving people who shatter societal expectations can expand our world.
Love makes us bigger.
LJ:
You weave research throughout the book, particularly in the essays and passages about your father and Asperger’s. Can you talk about your process? How do you approach research and how does it deepen the possibilities of memoir/personal essay writing?
RCF:
I can’t imagine writing an essay without conducting research, but I come from a long line of geeky thinkers. (I had to research the meaning of the word geek for one of my essays.) I traveled down rabbit holes looking for information about topics that arose in the essays, including alligators; World War II pilots; theories in ethics; the science fiction show Doctor Who; the 1969 oil spill in Santa Barbara, California; the Ecuadorian rainforest; and a Swedish ophthalmologist. I collected 10 times as much research as I included, partly because I strayed off-topic, and partly because my goal was to tell a story, not to write an academic paper.
I studied how other writers—like Natasha Tretheway, Eula Biss, and Ocean Vuong—included research without overwhelming their creative nonfiction. They sought meaning in the facts. They set aside precision (by not listing every possible detail; by rounding numbers since, for most people, digits are harder to read than words; by choosing the most interesting facts that illuminated the story). They used research to amplify emotional resonance. I’m still learning how to blend research and art.
LJ:
Writing about family can be risky. In Bigger, you write about your parents, your siblings, your child, your husband. Can you talk about challenges you faced there? What’s been your family’s response to the book?
RCF:
My family has been amazingly supportive. My sisters and I talk about my writing in our weekly Zooms, my husband reads my drafts, and when my child, who is now an adult, is in Seattle, we go on writing dates. I decided before ever submitting essays to literary journals that when it came to art versus relationships, I would choose the people I love.
When a story involved my sisters, my husband, or my child, I checked with them before beginning to write. On the rare occasions someone objected to a scene, I swapped it for one they felt comfortable with. I couldn’t get consent from my parents because my father died years before I wrote the essay about him, and my mother had Alzheimer’s, but my sisters gave consent in their place and contributed ideas for those pieces.
I know how lucky I am to have family members who are invested in my writing and proud of my work.
LJ:
Writing about our children in particular has its special challenges. How did you balance Indigo’s ownership of their own story with the gift you’ve given readers by telling your side of that?
RCF:
Indigo came out as trans in middle school. I wouldn’t have written about the experience back then. For one thing, they were in the process of becoming themself. For another thing, if I’d asked my young teenager for permission tell their story, Indigo would probably have said yes because they were vulnerable and needed my support. Parents have power over their children.
By their early twenties, Indigo was out as trans and nonbinary and had created a thriving life. When I began working on essays, I asked if I could write about what our family called the golden afternoon—the day Indigo said, “Mom, Dad, I’m transgender.” The only stories we had read by families who shared our experience detailed feelings of grief, anger, and an initial refusal to accept their child’s self-knowledge. I wanted to explore why Jason’s and my response wasn’t typical. I wanted to share a different kind of story.
Indigo was enthusiastic. I sent them my early drafts and asked for consent before submitting that essay, as well as other pieces that discussed my child. Sometimes editors or readers wanted Indigo’s point of view, but the essays were about my growth. Besides, parents of trans children can never truly understand their child’s internal journey.
LJ:
You employ experimental forms in Bigger, which is brilliant. Checklists, charts, academic forms, and in “Four Words” a kind of prose-poem style that offers a concrete representation of duality. As you write about expanding the world and readers’ sense of what’s possible, you expand the possibilities of the nonfiction/essay genre. Can you talk about your approach to experimentation? What joys and challenges do you find there?
RCF:
When I wrote the essays, I didn’t worry about publication, so I felt free to experiment. Each piece began with a situation (for example, my eyes don’t make tears) and I worked to develop meaning (I wouldn’t trade my dryness for tears because of what this strange disability has taught me). With each essay, I tried multiple structures, and on the third or tenth draft a structure would click and make the story what I wanted it to be.
Story comes first, though. The essay about Indigo coming out as transgender began as a straight narrative, and, although it was a huge event for our family, the piece felt lackluster. I tried a few structures such as braiding it with scenes from my work as a preschool director, but nothing helped me tell the story well, so I set it aside for a few months.
Before revising it again, I looked at photos from that time, and there in our living room was a full-size replica of the TARDIS from Doctor Who that my husband had built for Indigo, and I remembered he gave it to our child the day before our kid said, “I’m transgender.” I hadn’t connected those events. I tried interspersing lore about the British TV show with the narrative, and that structure seemed to recreate how magical it felt to our family.
LJ:
What’s next for you after Bigger? Where do you hope to go from here?
RCF:
I’m fortunate to have a strong writing community—friends from writing classes, other Seattle authors, and my M.F.A. cohort—who ask challenging questions about my work, as well as reminding me to stop talking about what I want to create and get my ass in the chair and write.
I’m working on my second book, a memoir that explores a few themes from my essay collection more deeply. I understand more now about the publishing industry, yet I want to replicate the freedom I felt with my debut book to write the story I want and not worry about what will sell.
As with Bigger, my next book will address issues that are polarizing in our society, such as immigration and gender diversity. Mostly I want to write a good story, yet I also hope my writing will allow readers to see the full humanity of people who live different lives than their own.
