For over 38 years, Karl Siegler worked tirelessly to elevate the stature of Canadian literature and culture. His life’s work, in its simplest explanation, was to get everyone else noticed and respected. He never thought anyone was paying much attention to his own achievements.
But they were, and last month Siegler’s phone rang during a regular morning at the breakfast table. It was an intern from Ottawa, and she had a question for him.
“She asked me whether I would like to be inducted into the Order of Canada,” he recalled. “So I’m like totally floored and my jaw is hanging in my toast. I didn’t know what to say.”
After taking a few seconds to compose himself, Siegler accepted and was briefed on the various protocol that comes with being a member of the Order of Canada. His lapel pin arrived in the mail several weeks later. Siegler and his fellow inductees will fly to Ottawa in the coming months for a formal medal ceremony and dinner with the Governor General.
The honour is a crown jewel on a career that has spanned nearly four decades. Anyone in the business knows Siegler as perhaps the biggest champion of Canadian writers and publishers there ever was. It’s a crusade that began in 1965 when he was a charter student of the brand new Simon Fraser University (SFU), growing more and more frustrated with an absence and misrepresentation of Canadian literature in his courses.
“All the authors and the works were either British or American,” he said. “Not a Canadian writer in sight, and I thought that was really strange.” It wasn’t until a Canadian Literature course in his third year that they finally started to appear, but as Siegler read through the nine assigned readings and attended the professor’s lectures he knew something still wasn’t right.
After a question on the final exam enquired as to why Canadian literature was in such a sad state, Siegler snapped. He knew the answer stemmed from people like his professor, and he told him so. “I went through every single one of these books and the way that he had taught us and pointed out how exactly he had denigrated the work of each and every one of these authors and created the impression among his students that…Canadians writing in English inevitably produced second-class, third-rate cousins to real literature in English, which was written either by Brits or by Americans.
“I was incensed that this material had been taught that way, especially in a university like SFU that didn’t have any of the traditional colonial and imperialist baggage,” he continued. “This was a new university. It didn’t have to start out by leaving Canadian literature in its substandard ghetto.”
Siegler ended up failing the course for his remarks but appealed to a registrar who offered to remove it from his academic records. “According to my university transcripts I never took any course on Canadian literature,” he chuckled, “but I failed this one with intent. I was going after this guy, and that was the start of my getting involved in Canadian writing and publishing.”
In 1974, Siegler applied for the position of business manager at Talonbooks, a struggling but cutting-edge publisher of Canadian literature. He became its CEO the following year and later its publisher as well, solidifying the company’s focus toward serious works of fiction, poetry, drama and anthropological texts. He and his wife Christy, Talon’s long-time administrator and production manager, moved to Powell River in 2001 and ran the company’s Vancouver-based operations remotely until their retirement in 2011.
During his lengthy career, Siegler would frequently dig his own metaphorical talons into anyone or anything that threatened the industry he loved so much. And the threats came often. During the late 1980s Siegler participated in negotiations for the Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States and later in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of the 1990s. He was successful in securing broad cultural industries exemptions under both, an important protection the United States is “still incredibly angry about.”
A three-time president of the Association of Canadian Publishers, Siegler negotiated many publishing support deals. He was the first call as a consultant and negotiator for other cultural industries too as they pled their cases to federal or provincial governments for funding. Early in his career he also co-founded the Literary Press Group of Canada and the Association of Book Publishers of British Columbia.
“I was on just about every committee known to man,” he said, adding that redeye flights became a regular occurrence, whisking him away from his business, his wife and his three children more often than anyone would have liked. “Christy was always my partner in all things, including in the business. I have enormous respect for her and it’s too bad she can’t share in this honour because I never could have done this without Christy’s support,” he said.
On the bookshelves in the couple’s Alberni Street home sit many of the nearly 700 works that Talonbooks has put into print over the years. “Most publishers won’t tell you this but there is a book that I think is more important than anything else that we published,” he said.
Fittingly enough, it has a great deal to do with the area the Sieglers chose to retire in. Indian Myths & Legends from the North Pacific Coast of America was co-edited by Dr. Dorothy Kennedy and Randy Bouchard. Published in 2002, it’s a translation of an anthropological study completed by Franz Boas in the 1890s, updated and annotated in consultation with First Nation groups stretching from the Columbia River up to Alaska. “He was the original guy who collected all of those stories you hear about bear and raven and killer whale,” explained Siegler.
Much in the way Siegler’s own work aimed to fight imperialism and elevate Canadian culture, the book was intended to do the same for First Nation culture. It’s a fitting parallel to his legacy.
“We’ve all come a very long way in my lifetime,” Siegler said. “I’m very happy to have contributed to it, I’m ecstatic…There were 54 recognizable Canadian literary works that you could study in 1968 in this country…Do you know how many titles are published now in Canada each year, on average, by Canadian owned and controlled publishers? Six thousand, and there is Canadian work on every survey course in every university and college.
“I had made it my mission all my life to accomplish this task,” he continued. “I’m delighted that somebody actually recognized or noticed that I had done something, because I’d worked so hard to do it.”
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