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Episode 338: Remembering Matt Tullis
534 Plays2 years ago
Matt Tullis was a professor, author, journalist, and podcaster.
Tullis Go Fund Me page: https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-tullis-family
Social: @CNFPod
Support: Patreon.com/cnfpod
Show notes/newsletter: brendanomeara.com
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Transcript
The Power of Audio Connections
00:00:01
Speaker
It's probably cliche to say these days that audio is an intimate medium, trite but true. You hear someone's voice coming through your headphones or your car stereo, and you get a real sense that you are partnered with that person, be it a radio show or a podcast. Couple that with a person's articles, essays, and books, and you truly feel like you know a person, even if you've never shaken hands or hugged or slugged back a few beers.
Remembering Matt Tullis: A Sudden Loss
00:00:32
Speaker
Matt Tullis, author of Running with Ghosts, teacher at Fairfield University, host of Gangray, the podcast, was a person you felt you knew. He passed away unexpectedly in September due to complications following surgery to remove a tumor on his brain. He was 46.
00:00:53
Speaker
You can find his obituary online and you can visit a GoFundMe page to help support the Tullis family, links of which will be in the show notes. But as a writer and podcaster, I wanted to celebrate Matt's life in the only way that a writer and podcaster can, by interviewing people who deeply admired him.
Celebrating Tullis: Interviews and Reflections
00:01:12
Speaker
I interviewed Matt a few years back about his wonderful memoir, Running with Ghosts, a book about his experience surviving childhood cancer.
00:01:23
Speaker
That interview is appended to this little tribute of sorts in full at the very end. You can seek it out there or you can seek it out in the CNF pod backlog. It's episode 64, about five years ago.
00:01:40
Speaker
Because we were fans of each other's podcasts, actually I was a fan of his, I have no evidence if he was a fan of this one, we knew each other the way so many of us narrative non-fiction weirdos and podcasters know each other through the digital world and through each other's work. There's a feeling of knowing, even if you've never met.
Tullis' Journey: Announcements and Aftermath
00:01:59
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Fortunately, I spoke to several people who knew Matt far better than I and have such wonderful things to say about him and the legacy he forged as a member of this community.
00:02:12
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Matt announced on Twitter, and I assume Facebook as well, that he was having surgery to remove a tumor on his brain. The treatment he endured that saved his life as a teenager essentially started this time bomb to future cancer and the clock was ticking very close to zero.
00:02:33
Speaker
In the Twitter thread, he mentioned how excited he was to write about the experience, bringing no doubt his signature, understated style. And it takes a lot of skill to write the way that Matt wrote. It almost sounds insulting. You have to say it's understated, but kind of like calling a quarterback a game manager and not a playmaker.
00:02:52
Speaker
And as a sports writer, I think Matt might appreciate that parallel. After the surgery, he posted on Twitter his final tweet right there atop the feed until someone may or may not delete his account. He said, hey all, yesterday's surgery was a success and I'm feeling great already.
00:03:10
Speaker
We were stoked. Then, just two days later, Glenn Stout, author of Tiger Girl and the Candy Kid, Young Woman in the Sea, and the longtime series editor of Best American Sports Writing, posted on Instagram that Matt had passed. Like, my gut dropped, like so many. All of us nonfiction fans and purveyors of the craft, all of us who somehow knew him, had a similar reaction. You know, then when I saw him, you know, he was posting on Facebook on Wordle,
00:03:40
Speaker
his wordle scores before surgery. And he was like, hey, my brain still, hey, I have a brain tumor. My brain still works. And post his score. And then, you know, I'm checking on the day of the surgery. Boy, there's a picture of him and he's all wrapped up in gauze, but huge smile on his face, his wordle score. And he says, hey, I guess my brain still works.
00:04:02
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So you kind of exhaled and thought everything was fine. And then I was up in Maine for a long weekend and at a place with very little internet or phone
Tullis' Legacy and Unfinished Work
00:04:13
Speaker
service. But I had some for a while and I decided to check in. Let's see how Matt's doing. And I saw the post by his wife. So that's how I learned about it.
00:04:25
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There was so much he had left to do, from teaching to interviewing to turning the best nuggets from gangray the podcast into a textbook of sorts, to the essays and articles and books he no doubt would have written. If there's a silver lining to any of this, such as it is, it's that writers, by virtue of the craft, leave something akin to a paper trail behind. Here's Kim Cross, author of What Stands in a Storm and The Stahl House.
00:04:53
Speaker
and an award-winning features writer whose work has been featured in Best American Sports Writing and the year's best, sports writing. You know what he's left us is this little bit of immortality in that you know we can always go and listen to his voice talking about stories with people who love talking about stories and that's a pretty awesome legacy and so I know that you know I really love teaching narrative non-fiction and
00:05:17
Speaker
And I will keep assigning those podcasts. And so I think that keeping people listening to what he did. I mean, what's cool is that the podcasts and the stories are very... I don't feel like they have a short shelf life. I feel like they...
00:05:35
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they're gonna be instructive for a long time. And that's really cool. And speaking with a handful of people, I corralled for this audio obituary of sorts. The prevailing way of describing Matt was how void of ego he was. Like, this is a subgenre of writing that often celebrates stylists, be it Didion, Mailer, Wolf, right through Wallace, Orlean, Sullivan, Thompson.
00:06:02
Speaker
And there's a degree of showmanship that comes with the turf. Twin that with the rise of social media and you get a perfect storm of people espousing their own individual greatness. Unless it was about his posts about running, Matt never took a figurative selfie. The camera was always facing out.
00:06:23
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this circle that formed, if you will.
Matt Tullis: Humility and Connection
00:06:27
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This is Ben Montgomery. He's the author of A Shot in the Moonlight and the founder of the original Gangray blog, an OG forum to share and talk about narrative nonfiction. Just sort of naturally was a lot of egos. I think everybody who came to the table
00:06:48
Speaker
kind of brought with them the thing that makes some of us good, I think, which is like, you know, this strong sense of confidence that I'm going to do this and I'm going to do it well and I'm going to do it better than you. And there's some competition rolled up in that and things like that, but, and some machismo and whatever. Matt was like void of ego in a way that not many people who were in that circle in the early days of Gangray were and, uh, and not many people who were like,
00:07:16
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doing long-form journalism, serious long-form journalism work. He was a sort of a soft soul, if you will, in that crowd. And I liked that a lot about him because it, in my mind, meant that eventually that he would make a very good teacher.
00:07:39
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Here's Michael Graff, Southern Bureau Chief of Axios Local. He had this to say. I think it's just caring about people. I mean, that was what shined through in all of his work. He cared about the people.
00:07:57
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I don't know that, you know, Matt, I don't, I wouldn't say like he, he's not like he wasn't writing sentences like Hemingway. Matt was just writing about human beings, you know, and he was, he was, he was just like, Hey, look at this neat person I found, or look at this neat experience I had, or this really compelling experience I had where I overcame something. And Matt was just drawing on all those human instincts and, or human conditions and,
00:08:25
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And I think that's just key for anybody who's trying to, I mean, if you're writing, whether it's a short story or a long story, you want people to connect with it. Matt was just, that's one of those people who, if you talk to him, he really understood too. He would just had wide eyes about everything, you know, he was just,
00:08:46
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It was just like, I'm a part of this world and it's really cool to be here. And it's so cool that all these humans want to talk to me. So I'm going to tell their stories in the best way I can. And I'm just going to be enthusiastic about it. You got the sense that he would be the greatest like hype man in the world. Like if he was one, you know, he was introducing you on stage. Um, and he was doing that for all the people that he wrote about. And again, here's Kim cross. So I think that the fact that he contributed to.
00:09:14
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you know, the profession as well as to the academic side of the teaching of the craft, I think is a pretty cool thing that not a lot of people do. And that's, to me, that's what sets him a little bit apart in my mind. And, you know, there's a lot of us who teach and, you know, we're adjuncts, but he was, he was a full time academic, but he also published and he also did this podcast and he, he did all of these things just for pure love of storytelling. And, and I think that's,
00:09:40
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That's a pretty amazing life. Like he, he accomplished a lot and he was a really nice guy. He didn't have, you know, a huge ego. He was a kind person. He was, you know, earnest and genuine. And he, um, he loved elevating the work of others, which I don't know. I think that's just really rare and special. And I'm going to miss that about him. Here's Ben Montgomery.
00:10:02
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to get back just to return to what I think he brought to the world podcasting. So often people ask questions to hear themselves ask questions. And this speaks to the guilelessness of him too. He never asked a question that
00:10:18
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He wanted to sound good. You know what I mean? We all do that. We want, we want folks to know what the hell we're talking, that we know what the hell we're talking about by the questions that we ask. And as a host of a podcast, he often would just ask the most basic questions that that's what young people need. That's what a lot of us need to, you know, to learn, to learn from. And he was really good about that. And that's what I'll, that's what I'll miss.
00:10:44
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You know what's funny? Matt never pronounced gangray correctly. He always called it gangree the podcast. I had always known it as gangree the podcast. Turns out he was wrong all along.
00:10:57
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Matt Tullis. God love him. God rest his soul. He never pronounced the name of Gangre properly. I think he said it every single time. Gangre the podcast. He had it in his head and I swear I tried to correct him two or three times. I would like to repeat it back the appropriate way.
00:11:15
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And look, I made up the word. But in my head, I always said it gang gray, like the color gray. And he butchered it every single time into gangri. And my friend Michael Cruz and I would count a snicker about that. I was saying gangri again. But what followed after that was always something that was surprising and interesting.
00:11:43
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That speaks to Matt's personality and his question, his questioning ability.
00:11:49
Speaker
We could talk ad nauseam about gangray and Matt's stewardship of that podcast for hours. But we must talk about his writing. Glenn Stout, who like Matt grew up in rural Ohio, who also brings a working class ethos to the writing, first started working with Matt at SB Nation Long Form. Matt's first piece was about two rival horseshoe throwers. The story Matt wanted to write wasn't coming to fruition. He didn't know what to do. But Glenn simply said,
00:12:19
Speaker
write the story that is not the one that you want it to be so that's what Matt did it was a wonderful piece and a great lesson in nonfiction writing and reporting you take what the facts give you we can have this vision of what we'd like to happen the two rivals squaring off David slang Goliath etc but we can only fill our notebooks with what happened and cook with the seasonal ingredients available to us
00:12:46
Speaker
His writing is not over the top. It's all about arrangement and pace and rhythm. So the two had worked on a couple stories together and had built a sort of Buckeye State rapport and Matt trying to metabolize his experience surviving childhood cancer sent Glenn a manuscript. And then eventually, you know,
00:13:07
Speaker
He, after we'd done a couple of stories together, he hands me, just sends me, I don't even think he pitched it, I think he just sent me, you know, I've been trying to write this thing about growing up with childhood cancer. Take a look at this and see if there's anything there. And what he wrote, I really liked. And I was like, oh yeah, we can do this story. He forgot, I think he forgot his, his Walkman or his iPod one day, not a Walkman, geez, dating myself there. His iPod one day.
00:13:37
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And because he usually played music, he didn't play music. And he realized that when he was by himself, what did he start thinking about? Back to those times. But what was he thinking about? He was thinking about the other people, the other kids that he was sick with and the doctors and the nurses. And that was the key to write that story. And then, of course, Mike Sager later turned it into running with ghosts, Matt's memoir of that experience.
00:14:06
Speaker
Running with Ghosts, published by the Sager Group, was a rare book that made me cry. Now I'm a crier, I'll just throw that out there, but it's usually to movies or TV shows because music can really jack up a mood. But books? That's different. I've cried to Frank the Ford's book about his daughter who suffered from cystic fibrosis. Brad Listy's recent auto-fiction novel, Be Brief and Tell Them Everything,
00:14:31
Speaker
and Matt's running with ghosts. There was the simple moment of Matt being in bed sick and terrified watching of all things DuckTales on TV and I grew up watching DuckTales in the mid 90s and for some reason I so deeply felt the desperation and hopelessness of a kid dealt this terrible terrible hand
00:14:56
Speaker
that I had to close the book and dry my eyes. It was so simply told and that's the mark of a skilled worker. Here's Mike Sager, longtime magazine writer and founder of the Sager Group. It was previously published as an article and it was called
00:15:14
Speaker
Right, it was called The Ghosts I Run With and I couldn't deal with that title because of the dangling with and so we called it Running With Ghosts and all the rest was just me enabling him and I mean that's what we kind of do and I feel a lot of times like this sounds really corny but my dad was an OB-GYN and I helped start this company with a little bit of his money after he died and
00:15:38
Speaker
I feel like I'm helping people deliver babies a lot when that's what I do and So I have this intimate relationship with people where I kind of like I got my hands in their work and we're trying to make it good and we're you know, we're trying to create something that will last and like create legacy and I think we just we we did great and I think that I
00:16:05
Speaker
that Matt was able to sort of exercise some of his own ghosts or like learn, like sort of place them in the right place in his life. Through his 30s, Matt had tried to write the book more about himself. I mean, why wouldn't he? And it wasn't until he had greater distance that it clicked that it was the others. You know, in basketball, they have this thing about like, in order to get your shot off, you need to gain separation.
00:16:33
Speaker
you know, like take the giant back step and shoot or whatever. But like, I think some people, their opinions become valuable because they gain separation from the rest of society. By going through his ordeal at his age, 15, I think, you know, that really shaped his life and made him different. And, you know, once you go through that, you're just not the same as everybody else.
00:17:03
Speaker
Matt was a brave guy who had looked into the face of death and learned how to be kind from that. And as a reporter, he showed so much conscience. His whole book was about his conscience. And as a reporter, that's one of the things I try to bring, which I think a lot of reporters don't. You're trying so hard to get the story. You forget to be a human being.
00:17:33
Speaker
And I think that's what Matt brought, like this humanity to everything that he did by dint of the experiences he'd had and the crucible gone through. So I think that's his, really his legacy. He was human and he helped others and he was a teacher and through his podcast, he was teaching further and he was helping create a legacy
00:18:02
Speaker
for everyone that in turn created a legacy for him. And it's a real loss. And he started the podcast, which I think was one of the first podcasts kind of focusing on this kind of work and gave a lot of us who had projects going a forum to talk about them. You leave a mark in a lot of different ways. And he left a mark in a lot of different ways, I think.
00:18:25
Speaker
I hope a lot of people go back and read some of the stories, because I think they're really good, but also just remember the way that he did it. Not calling attention to himself, not preening on Twitter, except to brag about Wordle, you know, and stuff like that. And just focusing not on himself, but on everybody else, you know. Who does that? Not many.
00:18:50
Speaker
My friend Michael Mooney in Texas wrote a story recently, an essay for Texas Highways, and he talks about his love of cemeteries. When he first met his wife, they talked about death for some reason, I guess, on their first date. And she's a wonderful thinker. And she said, you know, there's three deaths. There's the one when you, you know, there's the one when you
00:19:16
Speaker
the part where you actually die. And then there's the part where people can't see you again. And then there's the death when people don't say your name anymore. And I think people are going to be saying Matt's name for a long time. So he's going to be with us for a long time. And I do think that those things he left, those very tangible things are wonderful legacies to leave. I think about that a lot too, you know.
00:19:39
Speaker
Every day I, you know, I check off some boxes, I make sure I get my kid to school, but like, I hope somebody is thinking about something I did, you know, a year, two years, three years after I passed away. And I think people are going to be thinking about Matt for a long time.
00:19:58
Speaker
Matt Tullis, he will be missed. And yes, his name will not soon be forgotten. He was working on a book of nonfiction craft based on the interviews he did as part of Gengre the podcast. As of this date, Seth Wickersham, ESPN senior writer, might be taking up the baton and trying to make sure that book ends up in libraries and on our bookshelves.
00:20:23
Speaker
If you want to hear Matt interview some of the best writers of non-fiction narrative, subscribe to Gangray the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and go buy his book Running with Ghosts and Google his stories that he wrote for SB Nation long form among other places.
Conclusion: Honoring Tullis' Impact
00:20:38
Speaker
There will be a link to the Tullis family, GoFundMe page in the show notes, Matt is survived by his wife Alyssa and his two teenage children Emery and Lily.
00:20:48
Speaker
And if you want to hear Matt and I talk about his book from a few years ago, stay with us to hear this 2017 conversation we had when the book came out. If the audio quality is meh, I'm sorry, it was five years ago and we're always looking to improve here at CNF Pod HQ. So in any case, thank you for listening to CNFers and may Matt Tullis rest in peace.
00:21:15
Speaker
So.
00:21:32
Speaker
He's someone I like quote-unquote met on Twitter and they you know listen to him with his podcasts and And I have been back and forth with him on Twitter and email and and then heard his heard his boys heard his recordings and it's like that the time I had him on the show was the one time I had like actually had a physical like conversation with him and it felt like
00:21:55
Speaker
I kind of like knew him still, and I kind of feel the same way with you. It's like I've been listening to Gangri for forever, and heard your voice, read your work, and we have mutual friends in the biz, and it's kind of weird that this is actually the first time you and I are having a conversation. That it is. It's really funny. Have you ever been out to Mayborn?
00:22:17
Speaker
the Mayborn Nonfiction Conference in Dallas. Heard of it. Heard great things. I have not been yet. It's the weirdest thing because I've gone two years in a row now. But like and so the last few years that I've gone, it is so strange. And then so you take it one step further and now you're meeting people in person who you've had Twitter conversations with. You've read their work. You may have even spoken, you know, a lot of for a lot of the people, it's people that I've done podcasts with.
00:22:47
Speaker
But I've never actually met them. Yeah, and then there they are in the in the flash. It is really kind of it's kind of surreal It's kind of cool. So
00:22:54
Speaker
Yeah, a few years ago, I was at Monmouth Racetrack. I was doing a book signing for Six Weeks in Saratoga. And a lot of people I know in that horse racing world were coming up to me, but I had only known them through Twitter. So when I was actually shaking some of their hands, they would say like, oh, my name's Norman. And but then he like gave his Twitter handle. I was like, oh, yeah, that's you. Yeah, that's funny. Yeah. Yeah, that's pretty cool, though. Yeah.
00:23:23
Speaker
Yeah, it's wild. So yeah, why don't we jump into a couple things. I'd like to get into some background stuff before we jump into the book, which was, I gotta say, before we even get into that in detail, it was just an awesome, awesome memoir, just powerfully told, beautifully written. And I was deeply moved by it throughout the whole 200 plus pages of it. So just well done. I just want to say that first.
00:23:52
Speaker
Appreciate I appreciate that so much because you know what the like I've been writing about this for so long Yeah, so long and I think that comes across in the book. I tried to make it come across in the book And you know the really the only thing I had ever published about that was the SB Nation piece Mm-hmm And so I had no idea I have no idea nobody nobody has really ever read this stuff except you know a select few people and I had no idea how I
00:24:19
Speaker
So it's nice to, to, to when I hear people who, especially people I don't necessarily know personally who say that, because, you know, you never know how it's going to help people are going to react to it. So it makes me feel nice, all warm and tingly. So thanks. So what, you know, at what point, like, when did words reading and language become important to you?
00:24:47
Speaker
Oh, you know, um, I was just talking with my daughter about this, this morning. She, she like asked me. Yeah. Cause we've all been told we've been talking about the book nonstop at the house. And, and, and she asked me like, when, like, like, when did I, like, when did I know I wanted to be a writer? And my daughter was 10. She's going, she just started the fifth grade yesterday. And I told her, you know, like I always loved reading.
00:25:13
Speaker
But then I think it was in the sixth grade is when I really started writing. I loved to write these stupid little things. And I had a sixth grade language arts teacher who used to like, used to say, you know, if anybody in here is going to grow up and be a writer, it's going to be Matt. And so I kind of carried, have carried that with me ever since. Like Mrs. Smith must've known what she was talking about, but you know, really, I think in high school, after I was sick,
00:25:42
Speaker
I had a really hard time reading. I couldn't concentrate because of a lot of the drugs I was taking. So I didn't read much for a couple years. But I was really good at taking notes in high school classes and at least focusing on notes and stuff. I could do that, paying attention to words and that type of stuff. And then in college it kind of just clicked because I started writing for the student newspaper and I found it all kind of just came easily
00:26:12
Speaker
for me in terms of writing stories for newspaper. And so I guess it kind of just all fit together with what Mrs. Smith said in the sixth grade.
00:26:24
Speaker
Do you think it was probably like when everyone's heads were down, you were probably one of the few kids who probably had a big smile on his face while he was writing. So maybe she just saw joy in your face. And like, you know, if someone's got that kind of love for this kind of exercise, then that's going to be the person that might glom on to it. I think so. And actually, you know what, I think in that class, they had us do way to turn in journals each week that we wrote in. And I wrote, like,
00:26:52
Speaker
I wrote like crazy stuff. I just wrote so much stuff that I think I was always just writing more. Like some kids would like just write like a sentence or something, but I was like literally, I think literally filling notebooks and handing them in. And I don't think any of it was any good, but you know, I just, I enjoyed doing it. And, uh, and so I did it and, you know, and I loved reading, especially like.
00:27:17
Speaker
You know, like the fourth grade is when I really started reading like a crazy third, third or fourth grade. I really started reading all the time, partly because we didn't really have anything else to do back then, but I just read, read, read, read. And I'll tell you, my wife and I were talking, my wife's a fourth grade teacher and we were talking about this. Um, like what books are kids reading? And I'm trying to get my daughter to read some books and stuff. And, uh, the book, the island of the, of the island of the blue dolphins, um, by Scott Odell.
00:27:46
Speaker
Um, is literally the book that I read and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is like the greatest thing ever. Um, I wonder if I could do this someday. You know, and part of me too, I think it was like in the fourth grade. I think it was fourth grade. My elementary school started this thing called the reading games and where they gave us like 15 books and kids who wanted to read them could, uh, they're encouraged just to read them.
00:28:10
Speaker
But then it was going to come down to like, uh, like basically trivia within the fourth grade, but then we were going to go against the other schools in the district. And I've always been super, super competitive, like really ridiculously competitive when it comes to sports and when it comes to even like.
00:28:27
Speaker
trying to prove my own intelligence over other people at least you know I did that when I was younger and so I read all 15 books and I just I killed it in the reading game and I don't know if that like that had to have had something to do with it too that I was just like I really love doing this so and I that's I think that's when I read Island of the Blue Dolphins because I think it was one of the 15 books that we could read so I
00:28:53
Speaker
How has that competitiveness helped you over the years in terms of your writing career? I don't know. That's a good question. I think it helps me because I want, when I write a story, I want it to get as big an audience as possible. And so if anything,
00:29:16
Speaker
I don't have any problem whatsoever with being a shameless self promoter. And I know a lot of writers who don't like to do that. And so, so maybe it's not like from the writing standpoint, um, that being competitive has helped, but from the selling standpoint, um, I have no problem loading my Facebook page up with links to stories that I've written. I have no problem with blasting out, you know, podcast links.
00:29:43
Speaker
You know, and promoting the book, um, you know, uh, I'm not gonna, uh, my, my poor, my friends on Facebook, I know at some point in time, they're going to get tired of seeing stuff. Um, but I don't care. They can buy the book and then they can keep buying the book. I don't know. Um, so I think it helps there. I def I definitely want that that's where the competitiveness has come in here. One thing I'm happy about though, cause I could see how it could get bad is.
00:30:11
Speaker
I think some people who are super competitive can also tend to get jealous of other people who are more successful. And I don't feel that way at all. I love it when people who I like and respect and like to read, I love it when their stuff gets big and goes crazy. And it's not like, oh my gosh, how could a publisher publish that book and not my book? I love that. I love it when, you know,
00:30:40
Speaker
And I love to work with other writers. I'm not as a professor. I work with a lot of young writers, but I love, I love working with anybody who wants to just get better.
00:30:50
Speaker
doing the same thing that I do and I think sometimes when you're super competitive you might be afraid of oh my god they're going to take they're going to take my paycheck if I give them too many of the secrets and I've never felt that way fortunately so yeah you had taken my follow-up question that right out of my mouth because sometimes that double-edged sword of being really competitive can lead to jealousy because you look at someone else be like oh my god they I've been doing this two or three times as long as that person like how did
00:31:16
Speaker
And I've been trying to get into that publication for 15 years, and they got there in three. And it's like, what did I do wrong? And you can really drive yourself mad when you play that game. Yeah, I think I might have been that way when I was a newspaper reporter, just starting out and like not winning awards. And I'd be like, oh, I'm totally better than that person. But I think the older you get, the more you realize just how subjective the awards process are. And and I've really
00:31:45
Speaker
You know, there are still some awards I would love to win. But, but I also know that, you know what, I mean, not winning them is not necessarily an indictment against the work that I've done and that I should just be happy for the people who do win them because they've all, all done good work. So, um, I think I was, I think I was that way. I think I did have some jealous bones in my body when I was, you know, 23, 24, 25. But, uh, fortunately I've aged those out, I think.
00:32:15
Speaker
Yeah, I was kind of the same way. It probably took me a little bit longer to age out of some of that jealousy stuff, but it does nobody any good. You might as well... It's not like a zero-something. It's just a rising tide truly floats all boats, so why not celebrate people who got a great story in outside magazine or SB Nation long form.
00:32:39
Speaker
and made best american sports writing and all this like why not like celebrate that instead of just because that negative energy is just it's toxic to the work and then you're focusing on the wrong things and then you're you're not getting any better and you're not being a good participant in this community of writing yeah no i totally agree with that and and the community itself is amazing i think of non-fiction writers it's
00:33:04
Speaker
crazy how many people are completely willing to take an hour out of their day to do a podcast. Of course, a lot of times they're hoping to promote their own work, or to take an hour out of their day to Skype in with a journalism class at a university. I don't think I've ever had anybody say no to helping out my students, which is really, really cool.
00:33:30
Speaker
And I don't think you get that in every industry. I think writers, creative nonfiction writers, magazine writers, I just think we love it when people think enough of us that they want us to talk to them.
00:33:48
Speaker
We want them to talk to another group, and we're just like, oh my god, really? That's awesome. Yeah. And that subjective nature that you were talking about too is real important to consider, especially with anthologies or awards. And just think of it like, say, best American sports writing. Say it gets to the point where it's going to be evaluated by that year's guest editor.
00:34:10
Speaker
And I'm thinking about, particularly the year, say, Christopher McDougall was the editor, he's got a running sensibility. So it was no surprise that the 25 or so pieces, I think there might have been two or three running centric pieces.
00:34:27
Speaker
That's just based because it came through his taste, most likely. There are probably 100 pieces that could have made the final cut, but ultimately it comes down to the taste of that editor. So it's just another level of subjectivity. And you just have to, again, be just grounded and thankful that you can do the type of work that might get anthologized there. Yeah, no, I totally agree with that. You've been doing this for 15, 20 years.
00:34:51
Speaker
What do you struggle with? What are you continually finding yourself like, all right, this is what I want to improve on. This is what I want to do to make the next one sing a little bit better than my last one. Oh, my my biggest and most glaring weakness is in finding stories that I want to write about. I'm really bad at that. Really, really bad. And like I've been so thankful that I've been working on the book for the last year and a half, well, 20 months now almost, because I haven't
00:35:18
Speaker
had to like find other stuff. I'm really lucky. And then I have a regular job as well, uh, you know, as a professor. And so if I was a freelance writer, I would literally have starved to death about like five years ago. I'm so, I'm so bad. And I don't know, maybe if I was a freelance writer, I'd be better at finding story ideas. Um, but I really, I don't, I don't know. Um, I don't know what it is. Um, I'm just, I have a really hard time finding things.
00:35:47
Speaker
that I want to sink a lot of time and effort into when it comes to telling stories. So I think that's my biggest weakness. And that's one thing that I actually, I work on with my students as much as I possibly can, because I know how important that is, you know, to be able to find those stories that you want to tell.
00:36:10
Speaker
How much time do you say there's something like, you know, you wrote this great piece about these great, like, horseshoe players for SB Nation a few years ago. So, like, at what point, at some point, something hooked into you in that, and then, you know, you did pursue it with all your rigger. Right. At what point, maybe along those roads or along those checkpoints, do you say, like, okay, now it's time for me to bail or now it's time for me to actually lean into this more?
00:36:39
Speaker
Oh, you know, I, I do that type of freelancing so not that often that I don't know if I've ever bailed. I have to think if I've ever bailed on, on something, I, you know, I think I realized early on that not early on, but maybe five, four or five years ago, I'm really bad at doing travel type stuff.
00:37:02
Speaker
Um, I, I, I did have a story at one point in time. Um, I think it was for national geographic. No, I can't remember who it was for, but it ended up getting killed because it was a horrible story, but it was a travel story and it was just horrible. I don't know what it is about doing travel stuff, but I'm just not good at it. And so I was, you know, I think I kind of bailed semi on that story because I knew it just wasn't going to be good no matter how hard I worked on it.
00:37:32
Speaker
But like with a horseshoe story, this is, this is, I mean, this is how I am when I find, when I do find something that I know I want to write about. Because I'm so bad at finding things that I know I want to write about that when I do find something, I, I'm typically tremendously obsessed with it. And so I'm going to find a way to make a story out of it somehow, obviously not making stuff up, but in terms of taking what happens and
00:38:00
Speaker
fashioning that into a compelling nonfiction piece. The horseshoe story, that did not turn out at all how it was supposed to turn out. I mean, that story was supposed to be Brian Simmons, who is the second best horseshoe pitcher in the world, the man I profiled, going up against Alan Francis, who's the best horseshoe pitcher in the world. And I also wrote about when I was at the Clumps Dispatch, because he's from Ohio, that whole story was set upon the premise that they would meet each other in the finals.
00:38:30
Speaker
And that Brian would be going to try to knock off the greatest of all time for the second year in a row. Uh, and Brian was horrible. That was his worst tournament that he ever had. Um, I think he finished sixth place that year. And so I never like considered bailing on the story. I spent that whole tournament because it was pretty obvious early that he was not going to do well. I spent most of that tournament, like really working in my mind, trying to figure out, okay, what is, what is the story here?
00:38:59
Speaker
And I spent a lot of time talking to Brian in between matches and stuff and just talking about him and his life to where I finally came to what I thought was probably. The story should have been about and what it would have been. It should have been about that, even if it had turned out really well, you know, um, if it had turned out where he went up against, uh, the first, the number one guy, uh, for the championship.
00:39:23
Speaker
So I'm just constantly thinking about things. And when I get into something, when I'm obsessed with it, I tend to find a way to make it work. So what was that like, that sense of adaptability that you had to show when going into that it wasn't meeting your original expectations? So you did have to kind of report for maybe a different structure than you had originally envisioned. So how did you navigate that?
00:39:53
Speaker
Um, you know, one of the things I taught, I stayed in touch with Glenn Stout, who was the editor while that was going on. I mean, I was emailing him and this was really the first big piece I ever wrote in my entire life. It was the, I had never written anything that long before. And everything I had written up until that point had either been in newspapers or regional trade magazines, regional or a city magazine or, or a trade magazine. And so I was constantly in touch with Glenn.
00:40:22
Speaker
letting him know what was going on. And luckily he was, he was very cool headed and said, just keep following it. Just try to figure out what's going on. Um, just keep reporting. Um, a story will show up at some point in time. And it really did come about like, uh, just from talking with Brian, the main, the main, the main guy in that story, because we talked for about two hours, um, before the tournament officially began.
00:40:49
Speaker
So I didn't realize at this point that he was going to have a horrible tournament, but in that two-hour interview I realized exactly how many health problems he had had in his life and so I had that in the back of my mind as I'm watching him pitch these horseshoes and everything and so I was able to kind of Start reconciling the one thing I really decided I needed to do was show exactly how different he was from everybody else at this tournament because you think of a horseshoe pitching tournament and you think they're all gonna be like yokels out there and
00:41:18
Speaker
you know, just tossing the shoes and not doing anything. And they're all super professional, super professional. It was the craziest thing I ever saw. But Brian was still the one with like the baggiest t-shirt and, you know, the shoddy issues and the one that you would think would be a horseshoe pitcher, I guess. And so I started focusing on that. And then that kind of also helped me kind of understand where he was coming from.
00:41:47
Speaker
Did reporting on that story give you a greater sense of confidence that if you hang around long enough and then just let something unfold the way it's unfolding that you could in fact like shape a story out of something that was unexpected from you going in? Oh, yeah, definitely. And I actually kind of I think I knew this going in and that's why I had planned to stay for the entire tournament. Anyway, I was down I was in Knoxville.
00:42:13
Speaker
for five days for that tournament. I was lucky I had a friend who lived down there and I stayed with him. I got to know Jim Scheler real well, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for feature writing for his story, Final Salute, which was turned into a book. And it was about a Marine sergeant who has to notify families when their loved ones are killed. And Jim literally kind of started doing those stories because he was a newspaper reporter, but he was covering funerals for soldiers
00:42:43
Speaker
Uh, he was at the Rocky mountain news at the time. And when he was covering these funerals, he was always the last person to leave, uh, to the point where, and then he would come away with these amazing stories, right? The last reporter to leave, uh, to the point where, you know, Jim's talked about how the Denver post and they were in the same building. They, they established a rule where the Denver post reporters were not allowed to leave until Jim Scheer, Scheer left. Um, because he would just hang out. He would stick around.
00:43:12
Speaker
He would watch what was going on. He would talk to more people than anybody else. And I think that's really, and that's one thing I really tried to impart upon my students. And I think that had an impact on me when I was in Knoxville. And with a lot of stuff I've done, if you hang around long enough, you're going to, you're going to understand what the story is. Uh, cause it's going to come to you. Um, and I think Ben Montgomery has said that too, uh, at the Tampa Bay times, he said, he tries to never leave an interview until he knows exactly how the story
00:43:42
Speaker
That he's going to write is going to begin and how it's going to end. But it's a good mindset to have going in that you don't try to do it really fast. And unfortunately, I think we live in an age where we try to get stuff done as quickly as humanly possible.
00:44:00
Speaker
Because we have to move on to the next thing, and we've got to rush through it. But I think doing this type of stuff, you have to really take it slow. Yeah, and that's where it gives new definition or new meaning to long form. Oftentimes, that's just maybe misattributed to just word count. But really, it's like depth and length and reporting, because you can have a 2,000, 3,000-word piece
00:44:24
Speaker
That's that's long form. If you've put in the time in the reporting to make something that's just super lean and dense, if you've if you've done that kind of work, like it doesn't have to be eight or ten thousand words. You know, no, absolutely. I mean, yeah, long form should totally take into account how much time you spent reporting as well, because, you know, some of the best stuff out there is the super tight two thousand word pieces. You know, I had a I had a professor in my undergrad
00:44:52
Speaker
Uh, who used to say you've never make a story worse by making it shorter. Um, and he's not necessarily talking about like a quick hitting type of thing where you can actually leave out important information, but he's literally talking a big feature story, tightening it up and making it, making it more hyper focused than it was. Yeah.
00:45:13
Speaker
So when you were just getting out of college, starting in newspapers, probably reading some longer stuff, authors and reporters that you admired, what were your ambitions when you were getting into this line of work? Where did you see yourself going and what did you want to accomplish? That's really funny. So my first job was at the Daily Record in Worcester, Ohio, which at the time had a circulation of about 22,000.
00:45:39
Speaker
I don't think I, you know, I didn't read long form stuff. Not that it wasn't called long form stuff back then, but even like feature type stuff, I was hardcore. I was going to be, you know, I was a city reporter. I was going to, I wanted to maybe be a columnist someday, an editor someday.
00:45:58
Speaker
Um, I just wanted to like move up. I didn't really think much about what I was actually doing other than I was writing a ton of stories every day, covering, you know, as much different, as many different things as I could. And then, uh, you know, I did that for like four years at the same newspaper. Uh, I went from covering religion and health, which we like to joke. I wrote preacher features and disease of the week stories.
00:46:23
Speaker
Two, I then started covering city government in Worcester, Ohio, which is a small city of about 25,000, about an hour south of Cleveland. So I covered city government for a couple of years and kind of like got burned out to the point where I decided to go to grad school for an MFA in creative writing. So I did that, I did more creative type stuff, but I was still freelancing for the Star News in Wilmington while I was in grad school. I don't think I ever started reading really good
00:46:51
Speaker
really good narrative narrative feature writing until I got to the Columbus Dispatch in 2006. I started there in April 2006 and I was I was lucky enough to sit beside another reporter there who was all who was into this like you know this really good in-depth feature type stuff and he told me that you need to check out this website called gangri.com and I was like okay you know how to spell that
00:47:17
Speaker
You know, I checked it out and I was right around the time that Kelly Benham French wrote, um, kennel trash, uh, which was the piece on the pit bulls, the 90 more than 90 some pit bulls who were rescued, um, from a dog fighting place, but then all had to be euthanized. And that story just reading that literally, I think changed my entire life. Um, so now I'm like, Oh my God, you can do this in newspapers. And, and so that's when I really started reading a lot of that, that type of stuff.
00:47:46
Speaker
Um, you know, and I became, you know, addicted to gangry.com and the conversations that happened there and, uh, you know, just talking about like doing this type of reporting and writing that doesn't necessarily look like the stuff that I had always been writing before in my life. And, and, you know, I had always like slipped in these like narrative type elements into stories, but I didn't
00:48:10
Speaker
realized that I was doing anything that other people were doing. I didn't realize that community existed. I just thought I was being clever because one time I covered a city council meeting and I spent three paragraphs describing what these two city council women who at one point in time had been best friends, but then got super angry at each other over, uh, redistricting. I spent like two paragraphs, just two or three paragraphs describing what they were wearing and how they were interacting with each other.
00:48:35
Speaker
And I just stuck it at the end of the story and people thought it was hilarious, but I was like, oh yeah, you know, I didn't know what I was doing. I was just doing what seemed natural to me. And so to realize then that there was this entire other community of people who did this type of stuff was really, really cool.
00:48:50
Speaker
I love hearing writers talk about a piece of work that turned the world from black and white into color. It totally unlocked what they previously knew was possible with a type of genre of writing. And that's happened a lot with people I speak with.
00:49:13
Speaker
As after you graduated from reading Kelly Bonham French's piece, who after that started like who were the other writers you started to get turned on to? And you're like, oh, man, that's great. That's great. And then and then like, oh, this is what I want to start doing. Yeah. Well, I mean, I became obsessed with the Tampa Bay Times while it was the St. Petersburg Times back then. But, you know, just like all the work that was being done down there,
00:49:41
Speaker
You know with Lane de Gregory and Michael Cruz and Ben Montgomery And they were just writing all these amazing stories and they were stories and that was a thing that was really cool They weren't articles there were stories and I you know I convinced the clums dispatch to send me to a narrative a narrative seminar a pointer That was taught by Tom French who also has amazing stuff also done at the st. Petersburg Times Tampa Bay Times and
00:50:08
Speaker
And it was there, you know, that I started getting to know some of these people. And that's where I met Jim Scheler. And I started reading Final Salute. And I read his obituaries. He wrote for the Rocky Mountain News and the Boulder Daily Camera when he was there. And I was like, you know, these are just amazing things. They're not what they're not articles. They're stories. And so actually, you know, after
00:50:35
Speaker
After I did that, one of the things I started doing at the Columbus Dispatch was I kind of copied Jim Scheler and I started writing feature obits, feature obituaries on just ordinary people who passed away in central Ohio. And I think I did, I don't know, 12 or 15 of them. I wasn't doing them regularly. I was doing maybe one a month, maybe two a month before I ended up leaving to go start teaching. That was really, really helpful to learn how to start doing that type of writing.
00:51:02
Speaker
and expanding a little bit beyond the typical stuff that I'd been doing. I started reading Chris Jones once I started going to Gangry on a regular basis. He's, I think, one of the best celebrity profilers in the business. I know people don't necessarily like to do that type of stuff, but I remember reading his profile on Roger Ebert and just thinking it was one of the most amazing things I've ever read.
00:51:31
Speaker
trying to think like, you know, I'm trying to think about like, when it's really hard to like delineate when all these, these people come into like my mind and that I started reading. I think Tom Juneau, uh, I started reading him pretty early. Once I started going to gangree.com and, uh, specifically his piece on Mr. Rogers, which I think is also amazing. And then you, you kind of fast forward as you start getting to like, write Thompson and some of the people who are really doing amazing stuff right now. So.
00:52:00
Speaker
It was just like the great thing about Gangry and it's kind of sad that people don't necessarily go there as often as they used to and there aren't the conversations that used to take place. It was such a smorgasbord of amazing writers, you know, and there was always something new being posted. And so it was it was just really, really fantastic.
00:52:20
Speaker
And in this game you've been the reporter, you've done a lot of long writing, and now you do a lot of teaching, but also a lot of writing as well. And I wonder how much can be learned in this line of work and how much of it is sort of innate.
00:52:40
Speaker
That's like the age-old question for MFA programs. Can you really go and learn how to be a creative writer? I think it's a little bit, I don't necessarily know if it's a learning type of thing. I think anybody can learn to be a competent writer. I think to be a great writer, you just literally have to love writing. You have to be passionate about it, and so you're gonna do it a lot. So I don't know. I mean, you can learn some techniques. I think you can learn, okay, well, how do I use dialogue?
00:53:08
Speaker
How do you can learn about? different story structures That you can utilize truthfully I think since I started doing gangry the podcast I've become a much much better writer myself So I think you can learn but I think it has to be something that you are so ridiculously Obsessive about you know, it's not just something like oh someone said I should learn how to write I'm gonna become the next Mark Twain and
00:53:38
Speaker
It's not gonna happen that way, but but if you love it and you're passionate about it Then you certainly can learn learn techniques, but you have to be passionate about it because it's hard work So you have to do it just because it's like
00:53:55
Speaker
It's infused within your soul. You have to do it. Yeah, it's practice and repetitions. And you hear the Gladwellian 10,000 hours, like I'd wager it's you're better off getting like, you're probably getting really good at like 50,000 to 100 hours of this. Well, and you know, and that's the thing about MFA programs that are great is that when you enter one, you have to write a lot and you have to read a lot.
00:54:24
Speaker
It's not just like you're going to show up and go to some graduate courses and come away with a terminal degree after writing a couple of papers. There's a lot of writing involved and a lot of reading involved and just doing that makes you better.
00:54:38
Speaker
Yeah, I got my MFA and I finished it in 2008 from Goucher College in their creative non-fiction program. Over the years I've kind of struggled with the idea of having done that and kind of struggled with the idea of the utility of an MFA because a lot of these people that we admire
00:55:01
Speaker
all the greats in the genre of narrative nonfiction and even fiction, like none, almost none of them needed an MFA. They just went out there and did the work. So I've always been kind of like, should I have just kept doing it? And eventually, and then saved the time that it took to go to grad school. But in that time, in a year, I wrote a 360-page manuscript. I feel bad for Tom French, who was my third semester mentor.
00:55:29
Speaker
Like sorry about this, but it was it did it did embed that Like you're gonna I'm gonna write a ton of volume and I was committed to writing a book in a year And that's you know that's what happened so I guess in that sense it kind of it does crack a whip behind you if you do take it with a You know a certain measure of earnestness and rigor. Yeah, I think so um you know and the other thing you know with the MFA program is like this book running with ghosts is basically an evolution of my MFA thesis which
00:56:00
Speaker
I finished in 2005. So, you know, I wrote that thesis and it did, you know, I, I think I won like best nonfiction thesis that year, although I don't know how many of us actually graduated from the program that year, but then, you know, it didn't go anywhere because it wasn't, it really wasn't publishable. I think it was good, but it wasn't necessarily something that anybody would want to publish and certainly nobody did publish it.
00:56:27
Speaker
But then, you know, that's the great thing about these memoirs is you never know when the story actually is going to happen and you never know when you're actually going to understand exactly what it is. So.
00:56:40
Speaker
And speaking with Mary Heather Noble, an essayist and nature writer a few months ago, she always made a point of respecting the drawer. She's like, never kill a piece of writing. Maybe it's just not time for it yet. And she put it in the drawer and it turned out to be this great sort of award-winning essay that she did for Creative Nonfiction.
00:57:01
Speaker
And it sounds like maybe what you needed for Running with Ghosts was to let it gestate a little bit longer. You needed 10 more years with it. Yeah, it really was. The biggest thing that I always struggled with, with the idea of this book of writing about when I was sick, is I never knew what the ending was. And I never knew what the ending was because I didn't really know what the book was about. Because you can't write a book that says, I'm going to write a book about when I had cancer when I was 15.
00:57:31
Speaker
because nobody wants to read that. Because A, there's no narrative engine. Because obviously, if I'm writing the book, I survived. So the reader's not gonna read it, and it's like, I wonder if he survived, I have to turn the next page. You killed it, you killed it already. So then that creates this other, you know, this conundrum, like what is the book about, and what is the story arc, what is, if I have to describe this in one word, what's it about, kind of thing, because it's not just about
00:57:59
Speaker
The page turner is not going to be, did he survive? It has to be something else. It can't necessarily just be, oh, it's when I came of age from having after hat, you know, I grew up because I had cancer because that's, that's boring and trite and played out as well. So, you know, it really, it really did take at least 10 years before, well, I finished in 2005 and I started running in 2013.
00:58:27
Speaker
So it took about nine years before I started actually thinking along the lines of that would actually get, get me to what ultimately ended up being running with ghosts.
00:58:37
Speaker
Yeah, what struck me about it was, you said, how could you elevate this to something that's not just, I had cancer and I survived. It really came down to, as a lot of your friends and even caretakers were dying of cancer around you, and you italicized this in the book too, it was like, how can I
00:59:00
Speaker
how can I justify my survival? And I think that really got to the heart of it. It was like, what are you gonna do with this life when others were falling around you? And how did you, how have you come to justify your survival and take the life that you fought for? Well, I work way too much. I don't know. And I don't necessarily know that that's a question that I'm ever gonna be able to answer 100% with certainty
00:59:30
Speaker
I think for me, one thing that I always struggled with was this idea of what you mentioned, like why did I survive and how do I justify that? And I kind of had to come to the conclusion that I couldn't just sit around and wait on some sign that was going to answer that question for me, which I think I did for a while. I had to kind of create my own meaning. I had to kind of come up with this idea on my own.
01:00:01
Speaker
I had to just tell myself that this is why you survive and live with it. And for me, and I really realized, I realized this after the ghost I run with was published on SB nation. Uh, that was on April, uh, April, 2015. Uh, I realized after that was published, like within hours of when that was published, that I had bits of information about.
01:00:29
Speaker
some of the people that I'm writing about, some of the ghosts that are kind of the focus of the book. I had information wrong about their lives. So my nurse Janet is a really good example because this is the first one that came up. When the piece was originally published on SB Nation, I wrote that she died of breast cancer. And that's what I had longed for like the last 15, 20 years thought was actually the case. That's how I've lived
01:00:59
Speaker
When I went for 20 years, when I thought of Janet, I thought of my nurse who died of breast cancer. It turned out that wasn't actually, that wasn't accurate. She had a cancer that started in her gallbladder, which I found out because our world is so small. It turned out, and I mentioned this in the book, one of my wife's friends from college lived on the same street or in the same neighborhood as Janet when she was growing up. And her best friend was Janet's daughter.
01:01:27
Speaker
And so she texted me like literally 30 minutes after the story went live and said, do you think it's the same Janet? Uh, and I was like, yeah. And so she put me in touch with Janet's daughter, which was great. But, uh, but you know, I was able to learn that, you know, here's this person I've been thinking about for 20 years, uh, 20, 21 years at that point in time. And I think about Janet and, and Dr. Kufis and the other patients that I write about Melissa and Todd and Tim. And I think about them.
01:01:57
Speaker
pretty much on a daily basis, I think. But I realized, you know, I've been thinking about these people just about every day for 20 years, and I don't necessarily know anything about them other than my experience with them at that one point in time. And so I kind of came to the conclusion that, like, so, you know, one reason that maybe I could have survived is because I can I can I can tell stories about them so other people will know about them.
01:02:23
Speaker
and know how much they meant to me, not only as a patient, but as an adult. But I also knew that if I was going to do that, I had to get the information correct because I'm a reporter and I don't like having mistakes in my stories. I don't like making factual errors. And so I think that's kind of what I came to. I feel good with justifying my own survival by
01:02:53
Speaker
telling the stories of those who didn't survive. How important was it for you to write this memoir as deeply personal as it is, but while simultaneously bringing that reporter's eye to it? It wasn't that difficult at all. I've been reporting on having been sick for a long time.
01:03:18
Speaker
When I was in grad school, I got a grant to go back to Ohio and get, I got about 50 or 60 pages of my medical records photocopied because I knew early on that it would be hard to write about a time when I was very, very sick. And when I was very near death, also as a 15 year old, I knew there's no way my memory was going to be right about that stuff. I knew that
01:03:48
Speaker
that memories can get cloudy, memories can be completely false at times. And so even in 2004, I went back and got records. And that was really, really cool because when I did that, I got enough records where I was able to actually build an actual timeline of exactly when just about everything happened while I was sick. And that was really liberating in many ways, because, you know, there was one instance where
01:04:17
Speaker
Like at one point in time, I thought one thing happened well before another thing. And then to find out that that wasn't the case, I don't know why, it just felt really like cool to know that. It was like, oh, that's so awesome that I could find out any of this information. It's all right here. And so it wasn't that weird to go back and report on my life. And so much of it was like,
01:04:43
Speaker
Basically reading my medical records doing the documents at least with regards to my own life. It was a little More difficult and like interviewing the families of of the people that I write about Actually interviewing them was not hard reaching out to them was hard because especially with with Todd and Tim who I write about a lot in the book because they
01:05:12
Speaker
They died 20, 22 years ago. And I knew that to have a reporter coming out of the blue to say, hey, can I talk about your son who died in 1997 would and could be very jarring. And so that was probably the most uncomfortable part for me was doing that outreach.
01:05:38
Speaker
I was lucky in that one of the patient's moms, Melissa's mom, actually reached out to me as did Janet's daughter because they read the piece. I didn't know Melissa's mom at all. I don't know if I'd ever talked with her before when I was a kid, but it just so happened that the university I was at prior to here in my alma mater, Ashland University,
01:06:06
Speaker
They reran the ghost I run with in the alumni magazine. And it just so happened that Melissa's mom read the piece in the magazine and she was like, I think that's my Melissa. And it's another example of something I got wrong. I had, I had Melissa's cancer wrong as well. Um, and so, uh, so she reached out to me and, and, and that, you know, that makes it so much easier than, you know, cause I'm the reporter now, Hey, thanks for giving me a call. I really appreciate this.
01:06:31
Speaker
Hey, by the way, I think I'm doing a book on this. Can I talk to you sometime? And she was really open to it. And I think most of the families were open to talking with me. But it's still hard to know that as a reporter, you're kind of ripping off a 20-year-old band-aid. And kind of pushing them into having to think about that again. And I don't think they ever regretted, you know, I haven't really talked with them about this, so I don't know.
01:07:02
Speaker
I can't imagine they regretted talking about someone they loved, but I do know that it can be hard.
01:07:11
Speaker
you read about this this well and i i just wanna maybe get you to articulate it too easy you write about the the awareness of your own mortality really one that hit you at fifteen years old and i was just like what was united in that sense that it's that experience like to be in that position in room four sixty two
01:07:34
Speaker
And at such a young age, having to confront that question that some people don't have to confront until they're, you know, at least till they're a fully formed adult. Yeah, you know, it was I just remember feeling so bad, just so bad. And this is the thing about cancer and leukemia and pretty much anything that has to be treated with chemotherapy is and fortunately,
01:08:02
Speaker
segue here I think we're moving away from the really heavy-duty chemotherapy that just destroys a body moving to more targeted therapies which is way better for a cancer patient but in 1991 it was still massive heavy doses of these horrible drugs and they just made me feel so bad that I you know I literally I I just remember laying in that bed and not really caring what happened
01:08:29
Speaker
Just wanting it to end in some way shape or form And that's kind of what I remember and you know and and a lot of the nursing notes. That's kind of that shows up sometimes but also I think sometimes like I You know when I think about that time when I was sick, I'm it's always the the worst right I think about how horrible I felt that's really all I think about I
01:08:55
Speaker
But apparently, like, there are, you know, one of my nurses, Teresa, who I read about a little bit in the book, she said that she loved to be my nurse because she thought I was funny. And I was like, how was I even remotely funny at that time? But I really do just, you know, the clearest memory for me is just staring out the window that was beside the bed that I laid in and just not ever wanting to get up.
01:09:21
Speaker
It wasn't even frightening at the time. I think it's more frightening to look back on now as an adult and to realize it as a 15-year-old, I felt that way. But it was really just so, the drugs are just so bad. It really is an absolute, you know, a carpet bombing of the body. It's mutual destruction of good and bad in order to eliminate the cancer cells
01:09:51
Speaker
And I just remember thinking as a kid, as a 15-year-old, that I don't care. Whatever happens, happens. Just make it stop. And as you progressed in it, you defeated all the antibiotics, knocked out an infection in your brain, and you start to go into remission. You talked about the Matt Tullis that entered the hospital on January 4, 1991.
01:10:21
Speaker
he died but from those sort of ashes if you will this turns into a resurrection story in a lot of ways like you left that behind and what was you know what was that like you know making that delineation for yourself and in the book and I just going going forward with that like you you would escape that that moment and you're able to sort of push push through that and maybe what would that Matt tell us like think of you right now
01:10:49
Speaker
Oh man, he'd be so disappointed that I'm not finishing my career with Chicago Cubs right now. You know, I did realize that the old Matt Tullis was gone, but I didn't realize that until, I didn't realize that for a long time. Or I didn't, like maybe I realized it, but I refused to accept it. It took me a really long time where
01:11:19
Speaker
I just wanted everything to be back to normal, and I was just going to be the kid I was supposed to grow up to be, which was the starting second baseman for the Chicago Cubs, who was going to replace Ryan Sandberg when he retired. I should be having my farewell season right now. So I got out of the hospital, and I really, in many ways, did everything I could to try to be who I was before I went in.
01:11:47
Speaker
I, uh, doubled up on classes so I could graduate with my own high school class. Cause I missed an entire half a year school actually missed about it. When you, when you talk about credit wise, I had missed basically the entire year. I had half a credit for my freshman year from typing class. Um, so glad I could type fast. So I doubled up on classes. All I wanted to do was graduate with my friends. You know, I went back and I started playing baseball again, and I went toilet papering people's houses with my friends and.
01:12:17
Speaker
uh, you know, really did everything I could to just like pretend like nothing had ever happened. And that, that continued into college really, really until I think some of, some of the, uh, some of the people I knew started dying. And even then, I think I kind of refused to accept that, that my life path was irrevocably changed based on what had happened.
01:12:43
Speaker
And so I don't, I mean, I don't know if I even realized that until just, you know, when I started running and started thinking about these, these people who didn't, who didn't, um, who didn't survive, uh, that, and, you know, as they do more and more studies in the, into the long-term effects of childhood cancer, especially survivors, you start to realize that the drugs that they save your lives with when you're that young are themselves carcinogens.
01:13:11
Speaker
they will cause cancer again at some point in time. And so, you know, when I was younger, I pretended, you know, I didn't know that. And so I could try to pretend to be this normal person again. And as you get older, you start to realize that that's not necessarily the case. I actually, one thing about long-term effects of cancer treatments, just yesterday, a really good friend, a really good acquaintance and a fellow writer, his name was William Bradley,
01:13:39
Speaker
He wrote the book Fractals. He also had Hodgkin's lymphoma when he was 21. We were the same age, so it was about 20 years ago. He just passed away yesterday from a cancer that was caused by the radiation that saved his life when he was 21. And so for the last 12 hours, since I read a Facebook post about his passing, that's all I thought about is these long-term side effects.
01:14:08
Speaker
And I think I'm fine, aside from some skin cancers on my head caused by the radiation therapy that I had. But the old Matt Tullis is lucky, or the new Matt Tullis is lucky to be dealing with these types of things now, because he's been alive for 26 more years. But you also have that lurking in the background. You don't ever know if you're completely done with it.
01:14:31
Speaker
Yeah. How does that affect and maybe inform your life now knowing that there is this sort of stealth ghost that could that could in fact like rear its ugly head again? I think the main thing for me is and I didn't start doing this until recently, but being super vigilant of like my health and seeing the right doctors, seeing the right specialists that I need to see.
01:14:58
Speaker
for a long time. I refused to go to doctors, especially after Dr. Kufis, my pediatric oncologist, died. I did everything I could to not go to doctors. Part of that was because we moved a lot. We moved from Worcester, Ohio to Wilmington, North Carolina, back to Worcester, Ohio, then to Columbus,
01:15:21
Speaker
We just moved around a lot for a variety of reasons, mostly job-related, but I never really set up a relationship with a doctor. But within the last year, especially since we moved to Connecticut, I've been really vigilant about making sure that I'm seeing the doctors I need to see. I'm doing the things that they say I need to do. For such a long time, I was so not healthy in terms of how I eat.
01:15:51
Speaker
As well as in the utter lack of exercise, like I was always considered myself a sporty person when I was younger. Um, but for whatever reason, as I got older and had kids, I just stopped doing anything athletic and I would literally sit on my butt all day and do nothing. And, uh, you know, in 2013 I started running and I lost like six, 40 pounds gained a few back, but, um, you know, I started running a lot.
01:16:18
Speaker
And so that helped a lot, uh, at least in my mindset, uh, it helped me feel a little bit better, but just, you know, seeing doctors on a regular basis and being cognizant and knowing what the, the, the medicines. Could do to my body, you know, and I'm 20, almost 27 years out now, and that's getting pretty far. And I feel like, you know, maybe I might be getting to this like place where.
01:16:43
Speaker
If all I have to deal with are basal cells, you know, basal cell skin cancers on my head, which are literally just a pain, uh, cause they, they, they just have to cut them off. Um, but if that's all I have to deal with, then that's a, I think that's a pretty, pretty good bargain. And you know, I'm, I'm running again now that we've got settled in Connecticut. And so I'm, I'm, I'm grounding back into running shape and getting ready to run the Akron marathon for the third time this year in September. Uh, so.
01:17:13
Speaker
With human training, it's probably right. I'm actually Akron. I'm not doing for team and training. I'm doing it on my own, but I am running the Philadelphia half marathon in November for team and training, which I'm really, really excited to do. I have not done anything with the team since Akron marathon in 2014. Well, I did another race with them shortly after that,
01:17:41
Speaker
It's been since 2014, since I've done anything with them, and I'm really excited to be doing that here in November. Cool. And I've just got a few more questions I'd love to ask you. Kind of rapid fiery, but they don't necessarily require rapid fire answers. Say, what are some books that you find yourself rereading time and again? It's funny. Tom, do you know, just put something like this on Facebook and I answered it. Now we'll see if I can remember what I answered. I read Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried at Least Once a Year.
01:18:11
Speaker
It is without a doubt the most impactful book that I've ever read in my entire life. I'm looking, I'm scanning my bookshelf right now, trying to see if there's any, most of the books that I read more than once are all at my house and I'm in my office right now. I read Paul Auster a lot. I don't know, I just love his narrative structure for his novels. Nonfiction wise, I'm totally gonna come up empty on this.
01:18:40
Speaker
You know, I, not necessarily any books, but, um, anything that John Jeremiah Sullivan writes I'll read. Cause I think he's amazing. Um, his book blood horses is ridiculous. His book pulp head is even better. It's a collection of his pieces. I never had that a couple of times. Yeah. So I think, uh, really though, um, the things they carried is probably the most.
01:19:02
Speaker
Prominent one and that's the easiest one for me to come up with just because I read it all the time I've got a lot I got out sentenced from it tattooed on my left forearm From the the story the lives of the dead at the end of the book The but this too is true stories can save us which I think is one of the greatest opening lines of any short story ever I
01:19:24
Speaker
What did a successful writer look like to you when you were say 20 and 30 and even then 40 and how's that how's that evolved? Oh man when I was 20 or you know 20 I was gonna win a Pulitzer Prize and I was gonna I don't know I have no idea I just wanted to like I think when I was 20 my idea you know this goes back to when I was in high school too and I think this has something to do with having been sick but I desperately wanted to
01:19:54
Speaker
to write a book even then that everybody would know, everybody would have to read. I remember thinking in an American literature course that I hope someday I'm going to write a book that in 100 years, students are going to have to read in American literature and they're going to hate me. So, you know, when I was 20, I desperately, you know, even in my first newspaper job, I desperately, I wanted to, my goal was to win a Pulitzer Prize.
01:20:24
Speaker
Uh, but I also, even then I knew I wanted to write a book at some point in time. Um, and I had bigger aspirations for what that book would be. Um, when I was 30, you know, I was just, um, I'm trying to think I was, I was just finishing up the MFA program, uh, at UNCW. And so obviously I think I was more hyper focused on the memoir and the book, um, maybe too much so. But again, I think then, uh, you know, success then was like a big, nice, big advance.
01:20:53
Speaker
from a publisher on the book and then maybe a second book at some point in time. Now, truthfully, I think it's a success just to have the book done and to know that some people will read it and will possibly be moved by it and will carry away thoughts of
01:21:20
Speaker
My doctor and my nurse and Melissa and and Tim and Todd They'll carry thoughts away with them in their brain somewhere And so, you know that for me that's a success right now as a writer Also, you know having another book at some point in time wouldn't hurt either But I think that's the biggest thing is just that it's done and and then the some people will read it and then for me that's success and
01:21:50
Speaker
Very nice. I think that's a great place to end our conversation on, Matt. That was, like I said, your book is wonderful. I wish you the best of success with it. And I think it's going to affect a lot of people and move a lot of people too and maybe inspire people to live a more enriching life, you know, the way you were able to honor your friends that have passed away and their caretakers and the way that you've
01:22:15
Speaker
chosen to live this life of intention and language and words and doing what you do. So I think you've mission accomplished with the book and I wish you the best of success with it. Thanks so much and thanks for having me on the podcast.
01:22:30
Speaker
Thanks again to Hit the Campus magazine and the 3rd Annual Hippo Camp for sponsoring this week's episode. I can't wait to one day attend. Maybe record a bunch of pods on site. Sounds like a good time. Can't wait to do it. Anyway.
01:22:48
Speaker
If you made it this far, friends, let me ask you for reviews on iTunes. They help more than anything. Gives a little extra cred, helps with rankings, and that'll allow me to keep doing this kind of thing if you dig it. Wanna say hi? I'm at Brendan O'Mara on Twitter and Instagram, where I often post pics of my storyboards and other fun show your work type stuff. Until next time, keep doing the work and let's keep encouraging each other. Thanks for listening. See ya.