The Writing LifeA look inside OSU’s hidden gem, the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing.

Karie Fugett, MFA ’18, knows that publishing doesn’t normally work out this way, so please suspend your disbelief for just a moment.

The year after she completed her graduate degree in creative writing at Oregon State, she published an essay in the Washington Post entitled “Love and War.” Her husband, a U.S. Marine, had been wounded in Iraq. After his return, he became addicted to opioids; he died of an overdose when she was 24.

The essay charts this experience and how, in the aftermath, she was able to buy a house, attend college and go to grad school: “From his ashes, I built myself into something beautiful and new,” she writes. “When I meditate on the sacrifice it took to get there, guilt and anger burn deep.”

Three months later, Fugett’s memoir, which traces her experiences as a military widow, was the subject of a 15-editor auction. “I had people from every major publishing house bidding on it for three days,” says Fugett, now 39. “And then I sold it, for a lot of money.”

Alive Day comes out in May through the Penguin-Random House imprint The Dial Press. “What the story is about is sad and terrible, but the book part — although long, and it’s required patience and whatnot — everything’s just slid into place,” she says.

Fugett began plotting the memoir as her graduate thesis at Oregon State, where she was a student in the Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in creative writing. With just a 3.76% acceptance rate, it’s one of OSU’s most competitive programs — and perhaps its most unexpected, given the university’s roots in science, agriculture and engineering.

We knew that we could make a family out of our program.

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Yet for more than two decades, the MFA has provided time and, importantly, funding to its student artists, preparing them for careers as writers and communicators. All students receive graduate assistantships, which waive tuition and provide a stipend for living expenses. Alumni have gone on to win state and national awards; just this year, Steven Moore, MFA ’16, was nominated for an Oregon Book Award for his essay collection, The Distance From Slaughter County.

“For two years, you get to find your voice and discover your territory, and no one’s going to be breathing down your neck just yet,” says Marjorie Sandor, the former director of the program and, along with Professor Emeritus Tracy Daugherty, one of its original architects.

For Fugett, the MFA allowed her to focus wholly on the project she came to write — “to play and do weird things and see if they work,” she says. “I loved that.”

But the program’s real magic — beyond publishing deals and accolades — might just be its tight-knit camaraderie, both among students and between students and their faculty mentors. “You find your readers,” says Lanesha Reagan, MFA ’18. The philosophy implicit in these relationships: an MFA does not need to be cutthroat in order to set its students up for success.

On a clear, crisp Sunday afternoon in September, a few dozen current MFA students, alumni and faculty members scattered across the wide sloping lawn at Remy Wines in Dayton, Oregon. A few sat on the chairs arrayed in front of a microphone where, soon, three alumni would read their work: Jesse Donaldson, MFA ’14; Loretta Rod-riguez, MFA ’23; and Nola Iwasaki, MFA ’23. The atmosphere was languid. Tor Strand, a current MFA student in poetry who previously worked at the winery, poured glasses of dolcetto. (He read a poem, too.)

In some ways it felt like a reunion — and this is the point where I should make an admission: I attended OSU as a student in the MFA program’s nonfiction track. I finished my degree this past June.

And so when I talk about the community and mentorship, my perspective is a little skewed. I hope you won’t hold it against me. To balance the scales, I did my homework: This story draws on interviews with nearly a dozen people affiliated with the program.

The MFA’s emphasis on community was baked into its very foundation. When Sandor joined the faculty in 1994, Daugherty — a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year for his biography of the writer Larry McMurtry — had already been working for nearly 10 years to bring an MFA program into being.

It took nearly another 10 to make it a reality: OSU awarded its first MFAs in fiction in 2002 and then added tracks in poetry (2006) and nonfiction (2012). “We knew that we could make a family out of our program,” Sandor says. “We really saw ourselves as the literal mom and pop.”

The groundwork had been laid decades earlier, by the writer Bernard Malamud — a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner who taught at Oregon State from 1949 to 1961. (Earlier in 2024, Malamud’s daughter, Janna Malamud Smith, organized an $850,000 gift to the School of Writing, Literature, and Film from her late brother’s estate. It will fund a visiting writer and an endowed faculty position.) Malamud also tried to establish a creative community among the faculty at Oregon State, organizing foreign film screenings and a reader’s theater.

There are material consequences to creating an academic environment rooted in as intangible a quality as community. “The best things that came out of grad school for me were the people I met,” says Associate Professor Elena Passarello, the current program director (and my former thesis advisor).

Each faculty thesis advisor normally works with only one or two students per year; the two-year program has 24 students total. These close relationships help steer students’ thesis projects and model “editorial attention,” Passarello says, with the goal of preparing them for future conversations with agents and publishers.

The core of the MFA is the workshop, a genre-specific class in which students submit their works-in-progress for feedback. Strong cohort bonds make for more constructive workshop conversations. But don’t think that this means everyone is simply nice; the sense of community creates a level of trust that allows students to provide meaningful feedback. Some students continue exchanging work even after completing their degrees; I’m part of a workshop group that includes graduates from five different classes.

“The writing life is really hard to keep up without a community,” Zoë Bossiere, MFA ’17, recalls undergraduate professors warning them before they began applying to grad school. Bossiere still remembers receiving the call that they had been admitted to OSU. They were standing in their family’s Airstream trailer, where they’d grown up. A photo of that trailer now illustrates the cover of their memoir, Cactus Country, which came out this year.

Additional reporting by Molly Rosbach