26 OregonStater.org C u Lt uR E PHOTO BY KARL MAASDAM, ’93 THE WRITING LIFE A look inside OSU’s hidden gem, the Master of Fine Arts program in creative writing. BY > KATHERINE CUSUMANO, MFA ’24 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.” (Read it at wapo.st/3NauQEh.) 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 imprintThe Dial Press.“What the story is about is sad and terrible, but the book part — although
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