From Student Newspaper to Novelist

When it comes to writing dialogue for his crime and noir novels, Matt Phillips ’13, attributes his ability to working at the Campus Echo student newspaper.

“What I repurposed is to sit and listen to people speak and tell their stories,” Phillips said. “When you are writing fiction, there is this premise that it is all made up. Fiction is (actually) a composite from listening to people tell their stories.”

It helped that faculty advisor, Bruce Depyssler, Ph.D., taught him a sort of shorthand for writing down quotes. “That practice of writing direct speech from human beings, that made me the writer I am,” Phillips said. “A language of conversation that sounds and feels real.”

Phillips, whose latest novel “A Good Rush of Blood,” was published in November, received encouragement to write as early as sixth or seventh grade.

“I distinctly remember a teacher saying, ‘you should try a bit harder, you’re actually pretty good at this," Phillips said.

In high school in Palm Springs, California, he worked on the student newspaper and in his teens and 20s he wrote poetry.

He moved to North Carolina when the woman who became his wife was accepted to graduate school. Phillips took courses at Durham Technical Community College.

“I lived in Chapel Hill,” he said. “I would ride my bike and I always rode through Central.”

He looked up North Carolina Central University (NCCU) and found that the Department of Mass Communication was then part of the Department of English – allowing him to enroll in lots of English and journalism courses. At age 27, he applied and was accepted.

“I was a horrible high school student and a multiple community college flunk-out,” Phillips said. “I did well in the courses I cared about and crappy on general education courses I did not care about. Central was the avenue of access for me and frankly it changed my life.”

Part of that change occurred due to working for the Campus Echo. In August 2011, he approached the then editor-in-chief, who assigned him a story about a Bachata musician. After turning in the story, the editor-in-chief said he needed an editor for the arts & entertainment section. Phillips accepted.

“It really was the crux of my education,” Phillips said. “Project-based learning with multiple other students and we had a voice. I can report on stories that I think are meaningful and they get published. It was fun to stay late on Tuesday nights to get the Echo in and to the printer.”

Depyssler was impressed with how well Phillips did as an editor, particularly with students who came to him with their first stories.

“He had total patience,” Depyssler said. “He would always say, ‘Does that make sense?’”

Phillips recalls writing election day stories in 2012 and feature stories about community members. In spring of his senior year, he gained an internship at the Denver Post, largely writing about painters, artists and musicians.

After graduating from NCCU in May 2013, he bounced around a bit. First, he moved to Denver to write feature stories, then to Palm Springs, California, to select films for a film festival, and next to El Paso, Texas, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts (MFA) at the University of Texas.

Phillips has a day job working in student affairs for the University of Arizona global campus. But he has had a parallel career as a writer with eight published novels. His crime stories began getting printed in small publications in 2008, and his first novel, a noir titled “Three Kinds of Fool,” was published in 2016.