Matt Tullis loved writing. He loved journalism. He especially loved the thing that became “Longform” or Literary Journalism, as my professor Norm Sims coined it. It was New Journalism or just great journalism told through the prism of storytelling techniques used by forms of writing — i.e. fiction, poetry, etc. This form goes against the formulaic structures of straight news stories journalists (are supposed to) cut their teeth on where fact rules all and ledes are direct and the structure adheres to reader expectation that pertinent information goes at the top and then it trickles down through the story.
Tullis, a beloved journalism professor, podcast host and writer of his own features, spent years studying and talking to writers about their work as he tried to put it into context. His podcast, Gangrey, grew out of a small website and became a place where he could explore larger ideas and just talk to the people he admired about the work they were doing. Often the interviews felt more like hangout sessions, as if Tullis and his guest were having beers or coffee and enjoying talking about craft and life. At its best, Tullis was able to get to the heart of why someone told stories and why these stories were the ones they were drawn to. Not quite a therapy session but deeper than a Q&A.
Tullis became the director of digital journalism and co-director of sports media at Fairfield University and brought that knowledge and experience to teaching. And he’d started his second book — his first grew out of an SBNation Longform essay he wrote about surviving childhood cancer called Running With Ghosts — when he died unexpectedly due to complications from surgery on September 23, 2022. He was 46, a husband and father of two children, and his friends, most notably ESPN writer Seth Wickersham, decided to finish work on what would become Stories Can Save Us: America’s Best Narrative Journalists Explain How.
Wickersham, with the help of Justin Heckert, Michael Kruse and other journalists and editors* helped complete Stories Can Save Us.
Kruse, a friend and senior staff writer for Politico and Politico Magazine spoke to me about Tullis and Stories Can Save Us.
The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
*I edited a few interviews in Storie Can Save Us.
How did you, Seth and Justin get involved with taking this project over?
When Matt died, we were already aware that this book was coming along and that he was fairly far along, but hadn't quite finished it. I heard from him about where he was in the course of the project, and when he died our question was: is it done? Is it close? What's the status? And Seth, to his great credit, took charge and made it his business to get in touch with the University of Georgia Press and, before that, with Matt's wife to check in and see where it was and what had been done.
What came back to us from Seth was: there's just a few things left to do and there’s some feedback from University of Georgia press editors. We were communicating mainly with Seth, and, long story short, there were a few interviews that needed to be done to sort of round it out, but everything else was there and ready to go. So it seemed doable and Seth threw it out there to a bunch of us. A handful of us, with Seth taking the lead, did the relatively small amount of work that needed to be done to get this project across the finish line because it seemed like such a shame, to say the least, that this project was so close to being done and now maybe it wasn't going to get done. We, as friends of Matt and admirers of his energy for the work, his passion for the work, wanted to finish it for him.
How did you meet Matt and get into your group?
I guess one place to start this circuitous story is in the Tampa Bay area way back when — I'm not even sure what year at this point — my friend, our collective pal, Ben Montgomery started a blog called Gangrey.com. It was a place that he and some others, me included, posted links to stories that we liked and we thought we could learn from. Often discussions in the comment thread would ensue and in some sort of rough, organic way. It was, for years, a place where we gathered to talk about the work, our own little sort of sub-community of people who did this work, wanted to do this work, loved the work.
Somewhere along the way, Matt started to show up in that collection of people. Some of us knew each other in real life. In many cases, we didn't or hadn't met each other yet. I think at the time, Matt was working at The Columbus Dispatch. At some point he transitioned out of daily newspaper work and was teaching journalism at Ashland University in Ohio, where went to school. He was teaching there and there was some sort of get together or panel at some conference nearby, and that's where Ben and I think maybe Tom Lake, maybe somebody else, met Matt for the first time. And, over the course of years, more people's paths would cross at conferences, we'd be in each other's cities or in the area and we'd get together for a drink and we'd talk about how things were going and what we were working on and other people's work.
During that time, Matt became part of this loosely connected network of people who did this work, wanted to do this work, studied this work. At some point, I couldn't conjure a year specifically, Gangrey started to sort of recede because blogs weren't a thing anymore. Twitter started to replace that. A better version of Twitter started to do that thing that Ganggrey had been doing. And at some point, Matt had the idea that he wanted to do a podcast and he wanted to sort of brand it as using the Gangrey brand, to the extent that that was a brand. He wanted to use it in the name of the podcast. That's how Gangrey The Podcast was born. It was Matt's thing. It was not Ben's thing. It was nobody else’s. Matt made that happen and then tapped into this network and outside of the network.
At that time, I wanted to do these kinds stories and there was a lot of hope — I was still pretty young at that point — for me to do the thing I wanted to do. But now those communities are kind of gone or gone offline and now a lot of the doors have closed, even more than they already were in a business where the doors are closed for a lot of people. But you guys had that place and it’s where I started reading Ben Montgomery in Tampa Bay, where you were at the same time and I wondered who are these people? How did I find them? It was kind of wonderful.
And even Matt at a place like the Columbus Dispatch at that time and he's doing this work — he's trying to do this work — and there are lots of Matts at Columbus Dispatches at that time — not lots, but enough — and there were enough places and enough slots at those places where you could do this work at newspapers. It didn't require a weird sort of offshoot like SBNataion Longform. As awesome as that was, for the stretch of time it existed, most of us were learning how to do this and learning from each other around the country because we worked at newspapers and we're trying to do these things on daily narratives or trying to and people were dropping stories in at Gangrey.
At the time, alt weeklies and the like were dying on the vine. And editors were also no longer able to teach. Their workload was becoming different. We didn’t have teachers that were allowed to sit with you and go over why they're making choices on your story, which I think is a really important thing.
It's a question of personnel at this point. Fewer and fewer people — reporters, and editors — have jobs that allow for that time and ask for this work. And, also, even if there is an editor who gets it, who knows this, who can teach it, there's so many demands.
It's intense. It's insane.
To me, reading through things in the course of finishing this book, and then when it showed up the other day, it's like I feel a sense of nostalgia and a little bit of sadness because these kinds of conversations don't happen as much. They don't even happen as much in podcasts that were cousins of Gangrey The Podcast. Even those podcasts don't scratch that itch in a way that — and I know that this is coming from a place of great good fortune — for years in St. Petersburg were my daily random conversations in my collection of cubicles in the newsroom were more than most people get anywhere. During the course of doing your daily job, you had these conversations and it just doesn't happen as much anymore because of all the changes that have happened.
More positively, reading or rereading these conversations in this book, I think for people who still do journalism — even if they don't call it narrative or longform or whatever word we're using at this point — and people who want to do deeply reported nonfiction work with narrative propulsion [can ask]: How do you do that? How do you think through that? What do you struggle with? How do you get through those moments of struggle, those puzzles that come up when you're trying to figure something out as a reporter when you're trying to figure something out from a structure standpoint? All of that is in here. If you have any inclination to still want to do this work, if you are doing this work, there are fewer and fewer books like this that aren't classics at this point.
In a previous version, I think, Matt even mentioned some of them [the classics] in the intro: If you are going to do this kind of work, the books you need at the outset to learn from new journalism. The terminology constantly changes from decade to decade, but we're all basically doing the same thing: reported nonfiction that reads like fiction or something like that. There just aren't that many how to manuals anymore, and, I mean, you could add this to the list. It is a thing that we don't see as much of anymore and I think this is a great gift that Matt gave us over the course of the life of the podcast and now in this book.
Even The Best American Sports Writing had to find a new publisher for some reason, which is the book that I think everyone who wants to write stories of this ilk was the one because sports writing lends itself to this. The other book, for me, that changed my life was compiled by my college teacher Norm Sims. It's out of print, but I found a copy on Amazon and I want to buy 800 of them to have. This is with the little life lessons in it, the little intros, and then the stories of what within it that you can take from was mind-altering and I hope happens for a book like this. You just want somebody to pick it up and say, “Oh, I can do these things. Look at what these people say. This is how to do it.”
I read it with a pen and underlined and I starred and I'm taking lessons from these conversations, many that I listened to when they first came out, but in some cases that's 10, 12 years ago or so at this point. So these reminders, these tips from people like Pamela Colloff and David Grann and Wright Thompson and on and on. I love shop talk. I don't do shop talk as much and don't have shop talk as much as I once did, and maybe I should rectify that. There's something sort of motivational about reading this book. You have to remind yourself not only how to do it and how other people do it, but also that the people who do this the best have the same doubts that I have, have the same struggles with how to get a certain piece of information or how to leverage this information to get this information, where to start a story, where to end a story, how to get from point A to point B. Even the very best people alive who do this work have those questions with almost every story they do. And there's something sort of not only helpful but reassuring about that.
What do you think Matt would think of all of you taking up the mantle to do this, to help make sure this thing was done? He always seemed like somebody that was very willing to work with a group.
I hope he would feel great that these conversations that he had through the course of his work with the podcast are out in the world in this book. I know that this project was really important to him. I saw early versions of it in my inbox from him. I'm grateful that he had done so much of the work already and that Seth and some others were able to step in and finish the job.
And I think it means a lot to his wife and I hope to his kids, and I hope it means a lot to younger reporters. It's sometimes easy to get down on the state of the industry. I know it's not what it once was, but I talk on a fairly regular basis with college kids, young reporters just out of college who are at least for now on fire for this work and want to learn. And those people who reach out to people doing it — people who've done it for a while — they're still coming. They still exist. There might be slightly fewer avenues to do the work or quite do it the way you want to do it with a staff job somewhere at a newspaper say, but I think this book helps solve that problem for the people who are still coming up and want to learn and want to do this work.
So I hope Matt would feel great about the fact that he has contributed this collection of wisdom thanks to his conversations for both those of us who've done it and want keep doing it, and those younger folks who want to start doing it and want to learn from people like Matt and people like the folks Matt talked to.
Is there anything else that you want to add or is there anything I should know?
I hope lots of people buy it. But, beyond just buying it, I hope people get a lot out of it, that the right group of people find their way to this book, and not just to the interviews Matt did, but, in some sense, to an understanding of who Matt was and his contributions to the craft.