Episode 54: Matt Tullis

On this episode, former podcast guest Steven Kurutz fills in for Matt Tullis, but only because our regular host is the one being interviewed.

Earlier this month, Tullis’s book, “Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer” was published by The Sager Group. The books expands upon “The Ghosts I Run With,” which was published by SB Nation Longform in April 2015.

In “Running With Ghosts” Tullis, who’s now 41, recounts the months he spent at Akron’s Children’s Hospital fighting for his life, and the years that followed, when he struggled to understand why he’d survived cancer when many of his fellow patients—and even some of his care providers—didn’t.

The book, according to Kurutz, is emotionally honest and moving and, although it’s a personal story based on memory, incredibly well reported.

Tullis is, of course, the host and producer of Gangrey: The Podcast. He’s also the director of the Digital Journalism program at Fairfield University. He is an associate editor for River Teeth: A Journal of Nonfiction Narrative, and has been noted in Best American Sports Writing three times and Best American Essays once. He was a daily newspaper reporter for about 10 years, culminating at the Columbus Dispatch, and has written for SB Nation Longform, Sports on Earth, Nieman Storyboard and Yahoo!’s The Post Game, among many other publications.