Gone, but not forgotten” is an idea often considered, but especially with the anniversary of the tragedy Sept. 11, 2001. However, for others such as author Matt Tullis, it is an idea that warrants daily consideration.

At present, Tullis lives in Newtown, Connecticut with his wife and two children. He is the director of Digital Journalism and an assistant professor of English at Fairfield University. He also hosts and produces a podcast called Gangrey: The Podcast, which has a focus on narrative journalism and reporters in the field.

Prior to working in academia, Tullis was a newspaper reporter for 10 years, writing for magazines and trade publications. As a writer, he has been noted three times in “Best American Sports Writing” and once in “Best American Essays.” He has an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and a BA in journalism from Ashland University in Ohio.

In Aug. 2017, Tullis’ book “Running With Ghosts: A Memoir of Surviving Childhood Cancer” was published by the Sager Group. The memoir is partially based on his experience as a child of 15 with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, but it is more focused on the people he knew and met at that time in the Akron Children’s Hospital who did not survive.

Though he had been writing about his experience with cancer since he experienced it, Tullis only found this new angle last year. Tullis wrote his memoir not to share his own story but to share the stories of people who were not as lucky as he was, so that their essense can never die but will touch the lives of more people than they knew even in life.

Tullis discussed this and the long process of taking his story and turning it into a book in his afternoon session, which was called “Talking to Ghosts: An Afternoon with author and memoirist Matt Tullis,” at Bowers Writers House. Tullis said that the reason it took around 20 years for his story to become a publishable book was that he did not really know what the story was about. It was not until he was on a run one day and found himself really thinking about those who did not survive that he began to put the pieces together.

Tullis wanted his book to be more than an “I was sick, then I got better” story, even though he had been writing ones like that for years.

One final push to write the memoir was the article he wrote for SB Nation, “The Ghosts I Run With.” The story concept was similar to that of the memoir. However, when the family members of a woman he wrote about in the story reached out to correct some of the mistakes he made in the article, he decided to go deeper and research for the memoir as if it was one of his journalism pieces, rather than writing a pure memory piece.

“I think about these people all the time, but I don’t really know them because I knew them when I was 15 or 16 and fighting for my own life,” Tullis said.

In the evening, Tullis read several sessions from his memoir, stopping several times to share further details or his inspiration behind certain parts. One notable thing was the sheer amount of research that went into the memoir.

From reading through his own medical charts saved from his time in the Akron Children’s Hospital to checking weather records to ensure he was providing the correct imagery, Tullis focused on the accuracy of the piece. Additionally, he conducted countless interviews with nurses, doctors, his own parents and family members of his non-surviving fellow patients.

“This way it’s not my faulty memory,” he joked.

Skipping around in the memoir, He read one section where his wife specifically tells him not to choose for readings. The chapter, called “The Purge,” was a vivid depiction of the first week after he started chemotherapy. At the time he began his treatment, survival rates were between 50 and 60 percent.

To give him a better chance, his family agreed to an experimental treatment in which they greatly increased the dosages of the medication right away.

“My system was just pummeled with drugs,” he said.

It became apparent why his wife suggested not reading this particular chapter when he gave an in-detail description of his urination and used the phrase “pissing the cancer out of me.”

First year international business major Nicholas Mich was one student who attended Tullis’ evening reading in the Bowers Writers House.

Mich expressed surprise that Tullis ultimately decided to focus on the lives of the others he met while he was going through his cancer treatment rather than only detailing his own obstacles.

“His primary message convinces us that ‘we can keep people alive by telling stories about them,’” Mich said.

Mich found Tullis’ way of telling his story impactful.

“As he read aloud, his words transported the audience back to the exact moment he was hospitalized, witnessing the pain and triumphs of accomplishing tasks that seemed simple to him before the incident,” Mich said. “He wrote his story based on reliving those tragedies, rather than looking back on them.”

By allowing himself to once again get close to the hardest part of his life, Tullis gives readers of the memoir the ability to come a little closer to understanding what it can be like to come face to face with death, from the point of view of someone who walked away from it and from those who did not.