Born in Big Rapids, Michigan, in 1883, Ethel Romig attended the Eastern Michigan Normal School to prepare for a career in teaching. Her plans changed in 1906, however, when she married businessman Charles Fuller and, shortly thereafter, moved with him to Newberg, Oregon, near Portland, where for the next fifteen years she would keep house and raise the couple's two sons. Then, at the age of thirty-eight and their children in their teens, Ethel started writing poetry, once explaining, “[W]hen the children have grown past the need of her constant care, and the making of a cream pie is no longer the adventure it once was, why shouldn't mother turn to some other work and do it if she can?”

Poetry became Fuller's “other work.” She published her first poem in The Lariat two years later. Discovering she had a talent for the types of popular verse common in local and mass-market publications of the time – she made her first ten dollars (the equivalent of $130.00 today) selling “Garden Bells” to Garden Magazine in 1924, and eight dollars more (the equivalent of $110) for two poems in The Buccaneer later that year – Fuller proceeded to rent office space in downtown Portland where she wrote with an unromantic diligence that fascinated journalists reporting on her independence and success in the era of the New Woman. One wrote:

Fuller was prolific – and successful. In the next six years, she would publish fifteen poems in Poetry (receiving honorable mentions in the magazine's annual awards in 1928 and 1929) and many more in publications as diverse as Out West Magazine, Life, College Humor, Good Housekeeping, Christian Science Monitor, The Spectator, the Epworth Herald, the New York Times, the Sherman Texas Democrat, and the American Mercury.