Fellowship & Fairydust

Robert “Bob” Harold Siegel (1939-2012) is one of the most underrated Christian writers of recent years.

As a poet, he wrote about nature with an intimacy that few have matched. One reviewer observed, “There is scarcely a creature, from the lowly earthworm to the majestic whale, that he has not written about with sympathy and respect—and with the uncanny insight of a man who truly knows his animals” (Bontly lxxvii).

As a novelist, Siegel made his mark early with the seminal fantasy novels Alpha Centauri in 1980 and Whalesong in 1981. Fans include George MacDonald scholar Kirstin Jeffrey Johnson, who described Siegel’s impact on her and her sister, introducing her to fantasy.

“We’d been raised in such worlds as Narnia, Middle Earth, and Prydain. Worlds infused with Scripture, yet entirely fantastical. Furthermore, we’d also been shaped by writers such as Madeleine L’Engle, Robert Siegel, and Elizabeth Goudge: Christian writers who positively delighted in portraying this world as interwoven with fantastical ones (and who were thus able to show both the fantastical and the ‘realistic’ as imbued with mystery and beauty and truth).” — “At Home With Unicorns”

Despite an impressive body of work, there’s been very little scholarship on Siegel. His friend Madeleine L’Engle has been covered in a biography and at least four studies (including The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle, which Siegel contributed). His contemporary Walter Wangerin, Jr. has been the subject of at least two studies.

As of this writing, there is no biography or study devoted to Siegel, and Rolland Hein’s profile of him in the 1998 book Christian Mythmakers is still one of the longest essays on his fiction. Hoping to rectify this, I reached out to some of Siegel’s colleagues in the Chrysostom Society for their perspectives on him.¹ The following combines their perspectives with an overview of Siegel’s life.

Making His Bones: Siegel’s Early Years

Born in 1939 in Illinois, Siegel completed his first degree, a B.A. in English, at Wheaton College in Illinois. One of his favorite professors was Clyde S. Kilby, who founded the Marion E. Wade Center, one of the world’s largest Inklings archives. Siegel would reference the Inklings in many of his nonfiction works and credit Lewis as one of his inspirations for joining the Church of England.

“I was raised Presbyterian but I have been an Anglican for 49 years this November, having been inspired to change by C.S. Lewis (and by my lovely wife, who preceded me into the fold).” — 2013 interview with Pete Menkin

Fellow Wheaton graduate Jeanne Murray Walker (author of such poetry collections as A Deed To the Light, and New Tracks, Night Falling) met Siegel after they had both graduated through mutual friend Douglas Olsen.

“Bob was whip smart,” Walker said. “What no one told me about him and what I didn’t know until I met him, was how funny and kind he was.”

The 1960s-1970s were a brisk time for Siegel. He completed his M.A. at Johns Hopkins under creative writing degree trailblazer Elliott Coleman, then his Ph.D. at Harvard under Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Robert Lowell. Siegel’s first poetry book,² The Beasts and the Elders, appeared in 1973 to good reviews.

After teaching at Wheaton, Trinity College (Illinois), Dartmouth, and Princeton, Siegel accepted a position in 1976 at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He continued teaching there the rest of his career, with writing residencies at other institutions. In 1985, he spent a year as the visiting professor of English and American Studies at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany.

Siegel also made a significant friendship in  the 1970s. In 1974, he attended the Green Lake Writers Conference in Wisconsin and met Madeleine L’Engle. Siegel was “venturing for the first time to write fantasy” (Swiftly Tilting Worlds 136) and showed L’Engle a story he’d completed. “She not only read it but gave me warm encouragement, saying, ‘This is a fairy tale, and it is meant for adults’” (ibid).

Helping Invent Christian Fantasy: Siegel’s First Novel

1980 proved to be a successful year for Siegel, with two of his books appearing. In A Pig’s Eye was his second poetry collection, and like his first, a critical success. Alpha Centauri was a fantasy novel. Reviewer Colin Manlove summarized it as “a quite exciting tale of a race of centaurs left behind in prehistoric England after the fall of man has all but destroyed their ability to commute back and forth from their paradisal home star, Alpha Centauri” (Manlove 101).

Crossway publisher Jan Dennis recalls that before Alpha Centauri, he had only published one previous speculative fiction novel: The Wheels of Heaven by David E. Lawrence (Busse).³ It would be another six years before Dennis published This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti, usually remembered as the watershed novel that made speculative fiction acceptable to evangelicals (the target market for Christian fiction publishers like Crossway).

Alpha Centauri not only did well; it became groundbreaking. Dennis cites it as the first fantasy novel released by a Christian publisher to be re-released in paperback by a mainstream publisher (ibid). In a time when many Christians were dismissing anything with the words “fantasy” and “magic” as Satanic, Alpha Centauri got excerpted in Christianity Today. Siegel was profiled in the same Christianity Today issue, talking to Harold Fickett about his work as a poet and fantasist.⁴

The next year, Alpha Centauri became the first speculative fiction novel to win the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association’s Gold Medallion Award.⁵ The year it won this award, Christianity Today contributor Walter Elwell called it one of the “challenging new works of fiction,” showing how much evangelical writing had progressed since the 1950s (“Christian Publishing Is Caught Up …”). Another contributor observed, “Bravo! At last someone has seen the need for good Christian fiction and had the freedom of spirit to write this kind of book” (“Eutychus and His Kin”).

Siegel was far from the first to write a fantasy novel with a Christian perspective. The tradition arguably goes back to Dante, although Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien are usually remembered for creating the seedbed that led to the modern Christian fantasy novel. However, Siegel was on the forefront of a new movement of fantasy novels written by Christians. A decade after reviewing Alpha Centauri, Manlove discussed it again in his book Christian Fantasy. There, he described it as fitting a wave of “Christian fantasies… written in America” that became prominent in the 1970s-1990s (275).

Fantasy had begun going through a renaissance around the period Manlove described. Terry Pratchett called the period “the first fantasy boom,” starting in the late 1970s (“Terry Pratchett—The Colour of Magic”). Influenced by the runaway success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, the period saw a wealth of new fantasy novels, including several not-so-subtle riffs on Tolkien (which inspired Pratchett to lampoon the genre in his bestselling The Color of Magic).

Siegel joined during the tail end of the fantasy boom, alongside writers like L’Engle, Stephen Lawhead, Stephen Donaldson, and Richard Ford (Manlove 275-281). Their writings owed a lot to the Inklings, but articulated Christian ideas in other ways for their fantasies.

Whether or not the movement was mature is harder to say. Manlove observed that many of these writers were “heavily influenced by Lewis and Tolkien” (275) but felt “many of these Christian fantasies have quite negative feelings about the earth, which is seen as in some way blighted. The desire to escape is very strong and expressed itself in the very creation of alternative worlds which offer more excitement or more joy than our own” (278).

As is often true of Manlove’s work, his criticism is strict but captures a good point. Whether or not he was correct to see Gnostic overtones in Alpha Centauri, many of Siegel’s evangelical contemporaries did have that problem. Hal Lindsey released The Late Great Planet Earth in 1970, the period Siegel was making his bones as a teacher. Lindsey’s view of the world’s end—where God raptures the faithful before things get nasty, then obliterates his creation—inspired many Christian novels about the last days. In The Evangelical Imagination, Karen Swallow Prior refers to these works (such as Jerry B. Jenkins and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series) as prophecy fiction, and argues they are a subgroup of fantasy literature.

Many writers (such as Skye Jethani in Futureville and Kyle Meyaard-Schaap in Following Jesus in a Warming World) have highlighted the Gnostic overtones of such evangelical End Times stories. If the Lord was coming back to destroy nature in twenty years, who cared about tending it? Negative feelings about the earth proved very common in Siegel’s generation.

Writing a Classic: Siegel’s Novel Whalesong

While Siegel’s first fantasy novel may have left Manlove unsure whether he liked the earth, his second made his intentions clear. Whalesong, published in 1981, tells the story of Hruna, a humpback whale who must take the adults whales’ rite of passage: the Lonely Cruise, a trip to the depths to meet the Great Whale and learns his species’ history. According to Wheaton College Archives’ profile on Siegel, L’Engle was one of the books’ early proponents, calling it “one of those rare and wondrous things, a book which is born a classic.”

If Manlove is correct that many American fantasists of Siegel’s generation seemed world-denying, Whalesong showed Siegel truly loved the natural world. Whalesong is a mythic treatment of natural animals but filled with respect for them. Hein commended how “with appreciable imaginative strength Siegel recreated the thoughts and feelings of a whale” (278) and “We gain a keener comprehension of the barbarities of whalehunting, the ironic finality of sunken ships, and the nature-invading calamities of oil spills” (279). That love for nature was already evident in Siegel’s poetry, something Walker argues he took to unusual places.

“Bob was brilliant at a certain kind of lyric poem,” she said. “I have all his autographed books because he sent them to me as they came out. When I take them out and read over some of the poems I’m aware of how often he wrote about animals, sometimes from the animal’s point of view. I don’t know of any other contemporary poet who’s done that. I would love to hear someone talk a little about how that device works in Bob’s poetry. Think of Animal Farm, for example, though his poems are much less didactic. In fact, they’re rarely even moral lessons. Bob was a fundamentally reticent and humble guy, certainly not eager to blast away in the first person to educate his reader.”

Whalesong continued that trajectory, at a time when few of Siegel’s colleagues promoted caring for nature. Releasing a “Christian fantasy” novel at the Satanic Panic’s peak was daring. Following with a pro-environmentalism novel, released in the year that Ronald Reagan entered office and the Christian Right movement officially arrived, was something else. For readers like Elwell, who saw Siegel as part of the “veritable explosion of evangelical writing” advancing the field, the book must have been shocking.⁶ Given the stance so many evangelicals took on environmentalism from the 1980s onward, it is perhaps not surprising that Siegel eventually shifted to the Church of England.

Protecting Creation: Siegel’s Environmentalism

Siegel would back up his environmental statements with action. A tribute published on Wheaton College’s Recollections website reported that in 1989, Siegel contributed an article to the Atlantic Monthly, alerting readers that developers planned to build offices and condominiums on a section of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Woods property. The plans failed, though Siegel’s part in the campaign to preserve Walden Woods didn’t get much press. Don Henley of the Eagles got the most attention for founding the Walden Wood Project (“Don Henley and the Walden Woods Project”), which bought the land slated for development (Smith 82).

While Siegel’s advocacy may not have gotten the highest attention, he was still a trailblazer. John Wilson observes how his writing consistently held that trailblazing reverence for nature long before it was fashionable.

“Long before English departments and writing programs went green, long before the advent of ecocriticism, Robert Siegel’s poetry and fiction firmly located the human in what is called ‘the natural world,’ though what he sees is infused with something not comprehended by ‘nature’ as many people now understand it…” — John Wilson’s review of A Pentecost of Finches by Robert Siegel, Magill’s Literary Annual 2007, 599⁷

Wilson met Siegel in 1996 at Calvin University’s Festival of Faith & Writing. Books & Culture (a bimonthly magazine that Wilson edited until its final 2016 issue) had debuted the year before, and he was seeking connections. Siegel was present as a guest speaker. They became friends. Wilson recalled Siegel as having both a sense of humor and unapologetic convictions.

“Bob was a complicated character, combining qualities that would seem incongruous to many,” Wilson said. “One of his defining qualities was a very strong sense of the absurd and the ridiculous, yet he was also an unembarrassed advocate for causes in which he deeply believed. It was from Bob that I first learned of the threat to sea creatures and their entire realm from invasive human sounds. This is the sort of concern that many people (even among those who are not dismissive across the board about environmental matters) routinely belittle and even ridicule. But to Bob (and I think he was right), this was a clear-cut moral issue with profound consequences.”

A Host of Witnesses: Siegel in Christian Community

Like Walker, Wilson got to spend more time with Siegel as a fellow member of the Chrysostom Society. The group was founded in 1986 by Luci Shaw, Richard Foster, Calvin Miller, and Karen Burton Mains. Shaw remembers him as belonging to the first generation of members they invited.

“I was a founding member of The Chrysostom Society, to which we invited Bob Siegel early on,” Shaw recalled. “He lived for a while in the Wheaton area and taught at a local college. I remember clearly his book Whalesong with its beautiful sonorities.”

The Chrysostom Society not only attracted some acclaimed writers (including Doris Betts, Eugene Peterson, and Philip Yancey). It also contained many of the Christian fantasy writers that Manlove wrote about. The Society’s early members included L’Engle and Lawhead, as well as Wangerin and Calvin Miller.

“We come from a wide range of denominations, from Roman Catholic to Quaker, Baptist to Greek Orthodox, and represent every genre of writing. At our yearly gatherings, we inspire and encourage each other, talk shop, and share writerly insights; we worship and play together.” — Robert Siegel, “The Word Made Flesh,” introduction to A Syllable of Water (vii)

During his years at the Chrysostom Society, Siegel contributed to several books the group wrote together. First was the round-robin whodunit Carnage at Christhaven, where he wrote the chapter after the first corpse is discovered. His poem “Blackberry in the Chimney” appeared in Stories for the Christian Year. “Musings,” an essay where he described falling in love with English literature in college, was collected in The Classics We’ve Read, the Difference It Made. His essay on poetry and fantasy, “The Well and the World’s End,” appeared in Reality and Vision.⁸

And there was his contribution to The Swiftly Tilting Worlds of Madeleine L’Engle: an essay where Siegel connected her work to poet Henry Vaughan. Siegel also included a short but valuable introduction about his friendship with L’Engle.

“When Alpha Centauri and Whalesong appeared, she welcomed them with praise more generous than a writer dared hope for, even from a friend. For her generous enthusiasm and support as well as for the hilarity fellowship of Green Lake I shall always be grateful.” — The Swiftly Tilting World of Madeleine L’Engle, 136

His contributions to these literary projects were excellent. Furthermore, as Shaw and Walker both recalled, he was a great friend.

“I loved and valued Bob as a friend and fellow poet,” Shaw said. “He was a very good friend back in the days when I lived in Illinois, near Wheaton College.”

“I wish people knew what a fantastic sense of humor he had, how good his timing was for comedy, and how deeply gentle and kind he was, always,” Walker observed. She particularly remembered his comedy coming out when Siegel was with Foster (author of such books as Celebration of Discipline and founder of Renovaré).

“The two of them behaved like a comedy duo during Chrysostom weekends,” Walker recalled. “Not that they planned it, but that Bob had enough of the academic professor’s ‘Aw really?’ shuffle, and Richard knew when exactly to plant a brilliant comment, which usually led to extended repartee.”

As well as being an entertaining friend, Siegel could be a wise advisor. Walker recalls particular advice he gave her during a stressful time.

“I must have mentioned to him about how the fast, competitive academic life plus raising two kids plus writing and publishing plus some positions at various organizational posts—it all sometimes made me crazy,” Walker said. 

“He knew me well enough to grasp that I’d been raised in a midwestern Baptist church, where our people, who were wonderful, maybe lacked the contemplative life. He either called or wrote to tell me that I should read Thomas Keating’s Open Mind, Open Heart. I found that book, and then I found more about meditation. It was a path Bob showed me when I needed it most. Taking that path, I learned something about how to stop, to be quiet, and to know who is God: not me, fortunately. I began to grasp that it’s possible to rest while someone greater holds the universe in place. For giving me that realization alone, I thank Bob.”

Finishing the Race: Siegel’s Final Years

Even as his life neared its end, Siegel cultivated teaching moments. Walker recalls her last meeting with him at the Society’s annual meeting at Laity Lodge.

“The last time I saw him, he’d brought a stack of library books about after-death experiences to show me, and he insisted that I sit with him for about three hours as he told me about one after another and sometimes read me passages,” she remembered.

“About an hour into this, I realized that he was making an argument that, yes, there is life after death. (Not like Paul in his epistles, where he talks about the resurrection as a hope.) Bob’s research was impressive, but what struck me as we sat in the big room at Laity Lodge with the sun streaming in, and the Frio River gurgling over stones below us, was how strange it was that this friend would need to spend a Saturday morning on that kind of intellectual project instead of going out for a walk. It was only after we got home and I heard from him that he’d been having serious back pain, that I began to put two and two together, and realized he probably had cancer. He had sent me just enough clues. By that Laity meeting, Bob may have already gotten a scary diagnosis, which he didn’t mention. He didn’t like to upset people, and he was anything but a prima donna.”

As the cancer progressed, Siegel slowed down but kept contributing. In 2010, he returned to Wheaton for Dr. Phillip Ryken’s installment as president and read a special poem for the event: “In My Beginning is My End.” In 2011, he wrote a passionate book review of Paul Willis’ fantasy series Alpine Tales for Books & Culture, comparing it to George MacDonald’s Phantastes.

He continued writing new poetry. Siegel’s friend D.S. Martin recalled that when Siegel was compiling a new poetry book, Within This Tree of Bones, he encouraged Siegel to include even more new poems than originally planned (Martin “Robert Siegel” and “Kingdom Poets: Robert Siegel”). On December 10, 2012, Siegel contacted Martin.

“… he entrusted to me the approving of the final proofs for his new book. He died ten days later. I am honoured to have worked with Robert Siegel to edit this excellent collection for publication. He had not mentioned his battle with cancer to me, until that final phone call.” — D.S. Martin, “Kingdom Poets: Robert Siegel”

Within This Trees of Bones was published in January 2013. Many of Siegel’s earlier poetry collections are easy to locate and purchase. His fantasy novels (including the Whalesong trilogy, his Kingdom of Wundle series, and the novels Alpha Centauri and Stargoose) are still in print, including recent ebook editions. Researchers can discover his papers through the Wheaton College Archives.

Much thanks to Jeanne Murray Walker, Luci Shaw, and John Wilson. You can find out more about Walker’s upcoming book, Leaping from the Burning Train, on Slant Books’ website. John Wilson currently serves as a contributing editor to Englewood Review of Books. Shaw’s latest book, Angels Everywhere, is available through Paraclete Press.

This article contains original interview material. All contents copyright 2022 by G. Connor Salter, excluding any passages previously included in the October 11, 2022 article by the same author for Christianity.com.

Endnotes

1. I want to thank Chrysostom Society Vice President Matthew Dickerson for reaching out to Society members who could talk about Siegel.
2. There has been some confusion on this point. In Contemporary American Poetry: A Checklist: Second Series, 1973-1983, Lloyd M. Davis lists Siegel as the author of A Tale Whose Time Has Come, a story in verse illustrated by Karol Barske and published in 1977 (196). However, the book’s frontmatter lists its publication date as 1975, and the backmatter indicates a different Robert Siegel wrote it: a “college dropout” (70) who co-wrote the book with Barske during a “road trip from Chicago to San Francisco, via Mexico” (ibid).
3. The first edition of Wheels of Heaven lists its publication year as 1981. Dennis may have meant he had accepted it for publication, though it apparently didn’t appear until the same year as Whalesong. Little information is available on David E. Lawrence, other than the fact that he published another novel with Crossway, The Calling, in 1992. 
4. A longer version of this interview appeared a year later, in Christianity and Literature Vol. 30, No. 2, (Winter 1981), pp. 13-24. It can be read online at jstor.org/stable/44310802.
5. To give an idea of how groundbreaking this choice was, the Evangelical Christian Publishing Association’s records list three previous ECPA Golden Medallion winners. They were, in order: I Came to Love You Late by Joyce Landorf, a Biblical fiction novel about Lazarus’ sister Martha; The Kiowa by Elgin Groseclose, a Western novel following a Native American raid in Mexico during the American Civil War; and Caught in the Crossfire: The Trials and Triumphs of African Believers Through a Time of Tribulation by Levi Keidel, an adventure novel about African Christians surviving civil war in Zaire.
6. It’s perhaps telling that Christianity Today’s online archives don’t show any congratulatory letters from readers about Whalesong. It’s not until 1991 that Siegel gets mentioned again, in the article “Seasonal Escapes,” which recommends his books Whalesong and White Whale as Christian fantasy novels that readers may enjoy, alongside Harold Myra’s Children of the Night and Walter Wangerin Jr.’s Elizabeth and the Water Troll. 
7. I want to thank John Wilson for providing an extract from this review.
8. A revised and expanded version of this book appeared under the title More than Words. Siegel’s essay was later reprinted in The Christian Imagination edited by Leland Ryken.

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Cover Photo by Gabriel Dizzi on Unsplash