This blogger recently had her very first piece published in a literary magazine. The spring issue of Slightly Foxed has my article, Gone Fishing, about my late father’s love for the works of British-Canadian poet Robert Service. His favorite was The Cremation of Sam McGee, a ballad about a prospector in the Yukon who honors his dying friend’s request for cremation in the wild rather than interment in an icy grave.
And there is a Chile connection. I was living and working in Santiago at the time of his death, which just happened to occur the day after gunmen made an assassination attempt against dictator Augusto Pinochet. I was up all night filing stories, began a full day of reporting in the morning and had just collapsed into bed that evening when I got the phone call of his death. Some bitter irony here.
I flew back to the U.S. a few days later and at the reception following my father’s funeral I read The Cremation of Sam McGee. And then returned to Chile, and the dictatorship’s crackdown.
Notes on the Americas 