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Military veterans broaden and enrich the storytelling landscape of Fairfield’s MFA in Creative Writing program.

Reed Kuehn, MD, MFA’25 joined the military in June of 2001, just three months before 9/11. For the next 17 years, he was either preparing for war or at war. Trained as a general surgeon for the U.S. Army, Kuehn deployed five times during his military service — once to Iraq, and twice each to Africa and Afghanistan. Now a civilian, the graduate of ¶¶Òô»ÆƬapp’s Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program is making a name for himself as a writer, recently winning the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award for Veterans, a biannual competition hosted by the Iowa Review, one of the most respected literary magazines in the country.

A resident of Rhode Island, Kuehn is one of several talented veterans who have found their writerly voice and developed their craft in the creative writing graduate program in the newly christened John Charles Meditz College of Arts & Sciences. Home to faculty members and veterans Phil Klay, a New York Times best-selling author, and Matt Gallagher, a Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist, Fairfield’s MFA program is attracting and shaping the next generation of veteran writers like Kuehn.

Writing was never an activity in which Kuehn willingly engaged outside of school assignments. He always enjoyed reading and excelled in his English courses — nearly earning a second major in college because he took so many electives in literature — yet the desire to write eluded him. That is, until many years later, when he was deployed overseas for war.

“War is a mix of chaos and downtime,” Kuehn said. “A few deployments into my service, I had extra time on my hands and, for some reason, just started writing. I had not taken any classes or read any books about writing, which was obvious in my early work. The writing was not good, but it was enjoyable.”

After leaving the Army in 2018, Kuehn continued to write — the motivation being that it helped him make sense of his world. He began writing fiction as a means of exploring things in his life that he wanted to address. “I wrote some stories and struggled,” he said. “And then I wrote some more stories and struggled.” Eventually, he decided to look for a creative writing program to take his craft to the next level.

Fairfield’s low-residency MFA program proved a great option for Kuehn. First and foremost, its structure and location meant that he did not have to uproot his family for what was then a hobby. That Klay was on faculty there was a “huge stroke of serendipity.”

Kuehn became familiar with Klay’s work shortly after leaving the Army. It was then that he read Redeployment, Klay’s first published collection of short stories and winner of the 2014 National Book Award in Fiction. Kuehn connected with the stories because they portrayed war in a way that made sense to him. “Those stories are not about guns and blowing things up,” he said. “They are about people and adversity.”

What appealed to Kuehn most was that Klay wrote stories about war, as opposed to war stories. Though situated within the framework of the military, they dealt primarily with human struggle. Whether readers had military experience or not was irrelevant, for his characters faced challenges to which most people can relate.

“The people in his stories struggle with things that people see in their everyday lives, seen through a military lens,” Kuehn said. “Obviously, most readers are not facing those struggles in Anbar province, Iraq; they are facing them in Davenport, Iowa, for example, but they still get something out of the stories.”

According to Kuehn, there is a small group of veteran writers, including Klay and Gallagher, that write about their experiences in this way and do so exceptionally well. Kuehn aspires to be counted among those writers, so he was grateful that the MFA program provided opportunities for one-on-one mentorships with its high caliber writing faculty. For him, that dedicated hands-on time with Klay and his other mentors was the most valuable feature of the program.

Because Fairfield’s MFA in Creative Writing is a low-residency program, students complete most of their writing at home, meeting once a month with mentors, either in-person or remotely. Then, twice a year during the two-year program, they gather as a community for their residencies at beautiful Enders Island, off the coast of Mystic, Connecticut.

Each 10-day residency period brings together a uniquely talented group of faculty members, guest writers, students, editors, and agents to talk about writing, to learn about writing, and, of course, to write. Importantly, the residencies foster a sense of community among writers, creating connections for collaboration and creative support.

For U.S. Marine Corps veteran and alumnus Emilio Ramos MFA’24, the residencies were a highlight of the creative writing program. “I loved the experience of being at Enders Island, totally engulfed in writing,” he said. “I got to geek out about writing and have conversations with people who appreciate the subtleties of our craft.”

While there, Ramos also shared and workshopped his writing with other students in the program, which can be especially uncomfortable for veterans, whose military training emphasizes mental toughness and resiliency.

“You have to make a transition,” Ramos said. “You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable, to be open to making mistakes and growing, and to expose your mind and emotions — because those are the things that make good stories.”

That transition, for Ramos, was made drastically easier by having other veterans in the program. “It was great to have people to lean on, veterans who were going through the same thing I was,” he said. “We had a shared understanding of what it meant to serve, and we could relate to coming back to this environment that encouraged vulnerability.”

Air Force veteran Barbara Lee MFA’25 also appreciated the writing residencies and the camaraderie she found there with her fellow veterans. She equally valued the relationships she formed with the program’s non-veterans — students and instructors alike with whom she worked closely and shared connections and experiences.

Though a long-time writer of poetry, Lee found her voice as a playwright and screenwriter and was glad the program allowed her to explore multiple genres. “The process of discovering my niche as a writer was an interesting one,” she said. “I was trying so hard to be something I am not that I did not realize who I am.”

She added: “It’s the best thing that could have happened to me, and I am grateful to have had the support of my instructors and writing community at Fairfield.”

¶¶Òô»ÆƬapp offers a welcoming environment and supportive community for veterans, and nowhere is that more prominently displayed than the MFA in Creative Writing. The program has helped veteran alumni like Kuehn, Ramos, and Lee find their voices, but the advantage is not theirs alone. According to Klay, associate professor of the practice, the veterans elevate the program for all students.

“Our veterans have been wonderful students,” Klay said. “They have a range of experiences and attitudes and opinions and are writing on a variety of subjects. I think that creates a very healthy dynamic within the program, for everyone involved.”

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