From Notes to Letters,
A Young Storyteller’s Journey

Matt

Matthew Vann has always been a storyteller, but the pen wasn’t always his instrument of choice: his earliest love was music. Now a cello player, Vann has fond memories of growing up with a piano in the house.

“I would always bang on the piano,” he says. “My sister would throw things at me to make me stop.” He pauses briefly, his hands outstretched as if recalling the touch of the keys. “One day, the banging –“ he plays an inaudible chord – “converted into a melodic line.” Vann was hooked.

He began formal piano lessons at 9 or 10 years old. He still recalls a teacher’s remark, which he describes as a “watershed moment:”

“She said, ‘Matthew, you have to think about the storytelling quality of your music. You can’t just play and not think about your listener or your audience.”

Sitting in the student center at Columbia University, where Vann is currently pursuing a Master’s in Journalism, he weighs how being a musician has influenced his writing.

“I think words are music,” he says. “It really is an art form. The placement of a word can change the whole tone of a sentence.” This meticulous approach to his craft seems emblematic of the way Vann takes on anything, even his appearance. Dressed in a crisp button down, pressed khakis, and a tan corduroy blazer, Vann looks and acts far older than his 22 years.

“Some people say, ‘Oh Matthew, you’re an old soul,’” he says.

A familiar line patters out from the piano in the adjacent room, and he turns abruptly in his seat. “Oh! Oh!” he says, and hums the next few notes, which the piano player obligingly plays.

“I don’t recall if that’s Beethoven, or…” he tapers off.

Vann never considered becoming a professional musician. “I was too enthralled with learning,” he says, a value instilled in him by his mother, a retired teacher. She came from an impoverished family from Kingston, Jamaica, Vann says, and was given an opportunity for a better life when her father – Vann’s grandfather – was able to sell enough pigs to buy her a one-way plane ticket to New York.

“She instilled within me, and all her other children, that education is a way to better yourself, make a better life for yourself,” Vann says.

His father, a native Brooklynite and retired construction worker, left when he was around 11 years old, but they still keep in touch every few months. Vann describes him as a very strict, very grim character.

“When my dad walks into a room, the lights go out,” he says, only half-joking.

His first school, Ebenezer Prep, a private Christian academy in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, Vann recalls as similarly strict: uniforms and ties from the age of 8. He later moved on to Edward R. Murrow high school in Midwood, named after the famous CBS journalist who took on Joe McCarthy. It was here that he was first introduced to the idea of journalism as a profession, but, as Vann says, the seed was always there.

“I think one of the first pictures my mom had of me was of me eating a newspaper,” he laughs.

The idea of being a journalist started to crystallize for him during his freshman year at Brooklyn College. “I knew I wanted to make a difference in whatever I did,” Vann says. “I wanted it to have far-reaching impact.” Journalism seemed like the way of doing it. In college, he was a staff writer for the Excelsior, the school paper, and eventually worked his way up to editor-in-chief his senior year. The story of how he got the job is one he tells with some pleasure.

“I’d picked up a copy of the paper, and the front page was littered with typos. So I took a red pen and circled every typo I found, and slid it under the editor’s door with my number written on it,” he says. The editor called him shortly thereafter.

“‘It was a very snobbish thing that you did,’” Matt recalls her saying. “‘ – but come in and have a word with me anyway!’” He laughs.

At the paper, Vann wrote on subjects ranging from tuition hikes to academic freedom, but his fondest memory was the night of Obama’s election.

“The newsroom was empty,” he says. “I was racing home to write up my copy – the poll results had just come in. I think that’s when I realized, ‘this is what I’m supposed to be doing.’ I didn’t think there was anything else I would rather be doing at that moment than writing the lead story on the election of Barack Obama.”

Vann is excited to be covering the election this year as well.

This piece was written for a Reporting and Writing assignment at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.