The mourners drove a few blocks from O’Bryan’s Pub to the campus of Ashland University, where they snuck into the journalism school around midnight. A Saturday night, in late October of 2022. They were let into the locked building by someone who turned out to be sympathetic to their objective, someone who also knew and remembered Matt Tullis. The punctuation on an evening spent eating and drinking and raising glasses to hours of stories about their friend—these former co-workers, old students who now were married and had their own jobs in journalism, still thinking about his advice—at his favorite spot, where he liked to walk after the day was finished and have a drink himself. O’Bryan’s had decent food and moderately priced alcohol and to Matt a calming dimness of overhead lighting, and he liked to sit in a booth in the corner—it was the pub where, on the last day of class, he’d take anyone who was over 21 and wanted to go.
They weren’t exactly mourners per se. As the evening went on, it seemed a little less crippling that he was actually gone—that they had kind of brought him back to life for a short while, at least, and the journalism school was right there, where he used to always, always be. It was sort of mutually decided to visit where he worked, to trace his path up the concrete steps into the rooms and floors he spent years inhabiting as a teacher, as a reporter, as a lurker in the hallways in between classes, as adviser running the student paper and telling the Collegian staff We are doing important journalism here, Matt who not only oversaw the paper but picked it up from the printer and from his car distributed the copies around campus himself. Someone who was obsessed with what turned out to be an unending conversation until he passed away, Did you read this?, Did you see how she began this story?, arming younger writers with incessant bits of information and support: Just sit down and try it, Any type of writing improves your writing, it’s like flexing a muscle. Talking about stories so much that, we joked, he sometimes talked the topic into the ground.
It was in this building he began to first conduct the interviews for his podcast, Gangrey. The animating idea of the podcast—how do writers write?—defined the last decade-plus of his life and became his second book. Published posthumously this week after he died in 2022 following an operation on his brain, Stories Can Save Us features provocative interviews with journalists and authors like Vann Newkirk II, Audra Burch, Pamela Colloff, David Grann, and Tom Junod. The book’s title, from Tim O’Brien, was the tattoo that took up most of Matt’s left forearm.
Stories Can Save Us: America’s Best Narrative Journalists Explain How
By Matt Tullis. University of Georgia Press.
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The mourners went through the back of the old building and made their way kind of rowdily upstairs to the second floor, where Matt’s office used to be. It was now a utility closet. The layers of dust and old cardboard boxes stood in opposition to how lively a room it had been, Matt sitting beneath a bulletin board with the stories he’d printed out haphazardly and ideas for the newspaper written here and there and magazines flayed over the desk, before he became more organized later on. They lingered a few minutes in the office where Matt once defended his wardrobe choice of black button-down short-sleeved shirt with sparkly silver pinstripes, where Matt encouraged students individually or in groups to visit and chat, to shoot around ideas. Matt with his laptop open; Matt arguing about the ’80s hair band Savatage so much it was hard to figure out if he was joking when he said, This is real music; Matt buzzing on coffee and the adrenaline of having written his first big piece for SB Nation Longform about horseshoes (but “not really about horseshoes,” if anyone asked), never believing that he could do this kind of journalism until he hosted a panel of longform writers in 2012 and they encouraged him to try. It turned out to be an example of one of the lessons he tried to impart to his students, that stories never go the way you think they’re going to: The piece was supposed to be about the man everyone expected to compete for the world horseshoe title, but then the man essentially choked. “Feet of Clay, Heart of Iron” turned out to be a story about a guy who was losing his grip.
They found the room where he used to teach feature writing, eight students in an old computer lab, where he preferred to sit on one of the tabletops with his legs dangling casually off the floor instead of standing at the head of the class—the tables now vacant, the lectern pushed to the side. His old voice an echo talking about a feature story: What did the subject look like? What was their attitude like? What did they say? What did they do? Matt walking around and emphasizing a point, making sure the day’s lesson was more of a conversation than a lecture.
“He always said, Find another angle,” one of the former students who was there, Glenn Battishill, remembered. “Come early, work hard, stay later. That’s a big thing for him I use every day. Sometimes when I write stories, I think I’ve got enough. But would Matt think I have enough? Would Matt make one more call? Put your heart into this. Tell this story as seriously as you can. These stories deserve to be told. Also: He told us over and over, Never leave a meeting early.”
They looked for traces of him in hallways and around corners. The sound booth remained pretty much how it used to be when he started doing the podcast. The microphone was still the one he’d chosen and used to interview scores of writers.
He wanted to know about writers. He wanted to know about where they worked and what the view was like, if they had a window; what brand of pens they used; what shape of notebook. He wanted to know if they were habitual or had superstitions. He was in search of peculiarities that might’ve aided them in what they wrote. Matt was an attentive listener, his students in the feature writing classes he taught through the years remembered, so he was perfect for a project like the podcast, the book—and though he was a journalist with his own ambitions and ideas about method or craft, he took down notes and absorbed the advice other writers offered without any kind of disagreement or pretensions. So many journalists opened up to him with a thousand tips and tactics that it was difficult for him to digest, to remember it all or whittle it saliently into parts of his own process, which he’d actually learned firsthand through experience as a newspaper reporter and professor and adviser and eventually longform writer of nonfiction and memoir. These interviews, these anecdotes—a way to preserve not just the authors here, and their ideas, but his own life story as well.
Late in 2022, Matt’s wife, Alyssa, re-listened to a hundred episodes of that podcast, at first just in order to learn more about him, and to hear his voice again. “Then I got interested in the processes,” she said. “The different writers were talking to him about how they go about it. How they did was so intriguing to him, how they interacted with the people they were interviewing.” Alyssa looked through the Word files on his computer to help finish Matt’s book. Some of the documents were half-finished interviews or ideas about whom to talk to next, and story ideas that he never got to see to fruition. He was excited right up to the day he had an operation on his brain, when he got the news that the book had been picked up by the University of Georgia Press and would become real. “I would describe this book to other people,” Alyssa says. “It’s like a textbook of narrative journalism. And Matt would say, ‘No, no, no—it’s much more than that.’ ”
Like the writers he interviewed, he was habitual. She observed him down the hallway when he was working from home during COVID, saw firsthand the mysteries of his own routine, him conducting an interview, looking at his notes, clacking away or speaking into the mic, sometimes Matt just sitting there and looking out the window at his desk, engrossed—she preferred to leave him be. Though no one had been with him during his own reporting, to watch his own process and make note of it and include it in a book, it wasn’t difficult to guess, by listening to the podcast or being around him in one of his classes, that his own way of doing this—his own style of interviewing or hanging around—must’ve been self-deprecating and almost laconically patient. He had a blue Akron Marathon water bottle on the desk. It always needed a refill. The Akron Marathon’s sponsor for years was Akron Children’s Hospital, where Matt spent much of 1991 being treated for cancer. He finished the marathon three times while raising money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society through Team in Training. In each commemorative photo of Matt crossing the finish line, the hospital loomed behind him.
The mourners walked through a passageway between his office and a classroom that sometimes only he used, a passage that wasn’t for students, kind of like a secret entrance. Most of the people who organized and gathered for this outing knew Matt from a time of prosperity, when he would’ve been hitting his stride as a young professor, advocating for the power of journalism, of the story—and above creativity, or risk-taking, or ambition, imploring that students had to tell the truth. They found it impossible not to remember him, in his 30s, with his head shaved, with his backpack, with his rectangular glasses, chewing on a pen tip, lithe from running, snarky yet affirming, poring over proofs, the childhood cancer scars from when he had radiation shot directly into his brain now taking the form of excised lesions on his head and moles on his face and nose. Those years he and Alyssa lived in a duplex in Ashland with a 3-year-old and a 6-year-old. He invited students to come over and carry the classroom discourse to the dinner table, though there was really no room for them, dinner being cheap pizza. He gave students his cell number and told them to text with questions, no matter the time.
They took their time in the Collegian offices. Looking at the old papers. The old stories. The microphone and the radio wall. One last glance into the storage closet, into the classrooms. They had to turn the lights off as they left the rooms, rooms redecorated and shifted around to a point where Matt might’ve not recognized anything about them had he reappeared. The longer they stayed in the building, the longer they talked about him, it almost seemed like he could.
This essay is adapted from the afterword to Stories Can Save Us: America’s Best Narrative Journalists Explain How by Matt Tullis, out now from University of Georgia Press.