How the late Matt Tullis’s friends saved his story

Writer Seth Wickersham spearheaded the effort to get Tullis's anthology of journalist interviews "over the finish line" and posthumously published.

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Jun 04, 2024

The cover of the book Stories Can Save Us: America's Best Narrative Journalists Explain How" by Matt Tullis with a photo of the late Tullis to the right — Photo: Courtesy of Fairfield University

When Fairfield University assistant journalism professor Matt Tullis died due to complications from emergency brain surgery in September 2022, at the age of 46, he was well on his way to completing his second book. His first was 2017’s Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer; the new one was something altogether different: a collection of interviews with fellow narrative journalists that he’d conducted as host of the nearly decade-long Gangrey: The Podcast, an offshoot of Ben Montgomery’s now-defunct journalism website gangrey.com.

“Matt was really obsessed with how writers did it: their process, what kind of questions they asked, their writing quirks,” his friend Seth Wickersham, a senior writer at ESPN, tells Depth Perception. Wickersham felt it was important to get the book “over the finish line,” so, with Tullis’s widow’s permission, he and more than a dozen other journalist friends did just that, pro bono. The monthslong process involved editing the manuscript and conducting a few new interviews.

The book, out now via the University of Georgia Press, is called Stories Can Save Us: America’s Best Narrative Journalists Explain How. It features interviews with 27 prominent writers, including Pamela Colloff, David Grann, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Mitchell S. Jackson, Chris Jones, Tom Junod, Jeanne Marie Laskas, and Ben Montgomery.

Michael Kruse, senior staff writer at Politico, is interviewed in Stories Can Save Us and also worked on the completion of the project. “I say this lovingly: Matt was an extreme version of lots of us in this community,” Kruse tells Depth Perception. “He was just super-committed to not only doing this kind of work, but reading this kind of work, learning from this kind of work, knowing who’s doing it, who’s done it the best, who is on the horizon.”

Wickersham and Justin Heckert, a freelance journalist who gave the book its title and wrote its epilogue, recently spoke to Depth Perception about the project in separate interviews. The following has been edited for length and clarity. —Mark Yarm

What was Matt Tullis like as a journalist and a friend?

Heckert: As I wrote in the epilogue, he was “almost laconically patient.” He was as curious as anyone I’ve ever met, which, obviously, you need to be to do this. For his [MFA] thesis and as a reporter at the Columbus Dispatch, a lot of times he wrote about childhood cancer in various ways. This was before he wrote an essay for SB Nation longform that would become his memoir.

More than anybody I’ve ever met, he had an understanding of his own mortality. He had been physically scarred by radiation that they shot into his brain when he was a kid. So you were sort of always aware that he was a survivor. And as a friend, he was really, really loyal and diligent. He helped my career in many ways.

Wickersham: I knew him mostly in a professional sense: I’d been on his podcast, I had spoken to his classes. He was so passionate about this type of journalism and the art that went into it and the thought process. There are a lot of people who say that they’re passionate about things, but that passion has limits, and I don’t know if his passion ever had any limits. I think that his podcast was ahead of its time because you see all these podcasts now that have come up about craft.

How did you get the book over the finish line?

Wickersham: Matt’s manuscript had been peer-reviewed. And he had responded to the peer review in writing, thank God. So I understood immediately what the book needed. [The press] wanted more diverse voices of the people who were interviewed. We needed to get some new voices in the book, since a lot of the interviews had been done in, like, 2013 or 2014. Wright Thompson, Justin Heckert, and Michael Kruse did a handful of new interviews with writers whose work deserve to be in the book. I used things that Matt had said or written in the past to cobble together an opening essay in his voice.

Heckert: I interviewed Audra Burch at the New York Times — she’s the first interview in the book alphabetically. The book’s epilogue was my idea. I wanted there to be a remembrance about Matt that he wouldn’t have rolled his eyes at, that he would have thought was true and fair. And I actually came up with the title of the book, which [originally] had a boring title. Matt had a tattoo on his arm that said “Stories can save us,” which was a kind of mantra that he got from a Tim O’Brien book. And I thought, “My God, what a perfect title for this.”

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What’s your favorite piece of advice from the book?

Wickersham: A piece of advice from the book that stood out to me, that was helpful to me, was Eli Saslow discussing pre-reporting. Anyone who reads Eli’s work wonders how in the world he finds the stories that he does. He’s incredible. In the book, he discussed how he did his story on food stamps.

He spent days breaking down data and finding the place that he thought had the elements of what he wanted for the story: Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Then he spent days calling around Woonsocket grocery stores to learn which one was the best to show what he wanted. Then, when he visited Woonsocket, he had done so much legwork that his reportorial antennas were up and he could focus on what he was seeing and learning, as opposed to just landing there and trying to find the story cold.

Heckert: In Audra’s interview, she answers a question about being present and vulnerable and comforting people. She says, “I think it requires that you share something of yourself. I think the act of sharing is almost radical when we think about it in terms of what journalists do. I think what you share has to be authentic; I don’t mean performative.”

And really, we hardly ever talk about that. It validated me because I always end up sort of organically trying to get [subjects] at least a little bit interested in myself: “Here’s what happened to me.” “I empathize with that.” I find myself always sharing, perhaps oversharing.

“I wanted there to be a remembrance about Matt that he wouldn’t have rolled his eyes at, that he would have thought was true and fair.” —Justin Heckert

What do you think Matt’s legacy is?

Heckert: Besides being an author with two great books and being a good dude, he was a great champion of writers: promoting them, drawing attention to their work. He was a selfless champion of the written word.

Wickersham: He had dedicated his adult life to writing and learning about how to do these types of stories. And I think that he produced the definitive book about how to do them. When I went to University of Missouri journalism school — I graduated in 2000 — there was nothing like this. Eventually, The New New Journalism came out. With all respect to that book, I think this one is just better.

How the late Matt Tullis’s friends saved his story

Writer Seth Wickersham spearheaded the effort to get Tullis's anthology of journalist interviews "over the finish line" and posthumously published.

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