Life on the dead beat

Award-winning author and Globe and Mail senior feature writer and chief obituary writer Sandra Martin is UVic’s new Harvey Stevenson Southam Lecturer in Journalism and Nonfiction.While at UVic this term, Martin will lead a course that looks at biographical writing in the digital age. She will mentor young writers and aspiring journalists as they use multimedia to research and write “advance obituaries” for significant individuals who have local or provincial roots.

“Death provides the occasion, but obituaries are really about life,” says Martin, describing the best obituaries as biographical sketches, located somewhere between journalism and history. “I’m eager to explore this narrative form with the students—its venerable history and its ethical pitfalls and opportunities in a digital world—in a course that I hope will broaden and deepen their storytelling approaches and techniques.”

She will also give a free public lecture—entitled “From Last Rites to the Blog of Death: The Evolving Ethos of Obituaries in the Internet Age”—at UVic on Jan. 28 at 7:30 p.m. in the David Lam Auditorium. Martin will talk about the highs and lows of covering the “dead beat,” the ethics of soliciting a pre-death interview, balancing journalistic judgment with respect for a grieving family’s loss, the differences between eulogies and obituaries and the future of obituaries in the wired world.

Martin is a past president of PEN Canada. She is the co-author of three books, including Rupert Brooke in Canada and Card Tricks: Bankers, Boomers and the Explosion of Plastic Credit, which was short-listed for the Canadian Business Book Award in 1993. Her latest book is The First Man in My Life: Daughters Write About Their Fathers, an anthology of original essays, which she commissioned and edited for Penguin in 2007.

The annual Harvey Stevenson Southam lectureship is made possible by a $250,000 gift from one of the country’s leading publishing families. Harvey Southam, a UVic alumnus and journalist, was an heir to his family’s publishing empire when he died suddenly in 1991. His mother, Jean Southam, made the gift.