Avrel Seale grew up in McAllen, Texas, just a few miles from the Mexico border. The son of writer Jan Seale, the 2012 Texas Poet Laureate, and Carl Seale, a composer and conductor, Seale grew up cultivating a love for music and writing. He would often work on his own projects outside of school and found great pleasure in writing and the process of creating a project. Despite enjoying writing, Seale never thought he would be a writer for his career. Instead, he says he just “fell into it.”

Seale attended the University of Texas at Austin, where he graduated in 1989 with a bachelor of science in radio-TV-film. While he initially wanted to work in TV, he was unsuccessful in finding a job and began writing for The Monitor, the McAllen Daily Newspaper. His first essay was a reflection of a time he met guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn. Despite having no prior experience working for a newspaper, Seale was able to get a job at The Monitor and began reporting. At first, his work consisted mainly of hard news, such as following political campaigns. After a while, Seale turned to feature writing, focusing on lifestyle, art, religion, and pop culture. 

In 1992, Seale returned to Austin where he continues to serve as the editor of the University of Texas alumni magazine, The Alcalde. From 2011 to 2015, he served as the speechwriter for the president of The University of Texas. Since 2015, he has been a writer and editor in the university’s news, marketing, and development offices. Seale’s work mainly consists of content marketing. This includes content such as interviews with students and faculty and explaining the president’s plans for the university to the public through writing. Seale’s job allows him to connect with many people in different areas of the university and share their stories through his writing. 

Seale’s love of personal projects carried over from childhood to his adult life. In addition to working for the University of Texas, he is the author of ten books. Seale’s books range in topics from the mystery of the Sasquatch to theology. In 2018, at age 50, Seale had a major hemorrhagic stroke that left him partially disabled. He documented his experience with his stroke and recovery in his book With One Hand Tied Behind My Brain. His tenth book, Nuts: Down the Nueces River With One Stroke, is awaiting publication. Seale also writes on his blog The Trailhead. 

Seale finds that most of his work pertains to his personal experiences and interest. He believes the purpose of writing is to get to the core of a message and is not a fan of word counts. In addition to writing, Seale is an avid guitarist and still manages to play the guitar with one hand since having a stroke. He is a man of many interests and talents but finds that he is driven by projects. He is never done, there is always a new project on the horizon. For Seale, writing is not simply a hobby or a means of employment but something he must do. It is self-initiation that drives his work. 

Q: How did you figure out that you wanted to have a career that involved writing as opposed to something else? 

A: I never thought as a kid, oh, I want to be a writer. I mean, I can look back now, like in retrospect, and see things, little projects that I had done. I wrote a book when I was in eighth grade a short book, that was like fanfiction, for the Narnia series. I wrote the eighth book of the Narnia series and I typed it out and I drew a cover with map colors. Then my dad took me to the print shop and printed some. I printed some copies of it and we did it spiral bound. That was my first book was in eighth grade. So, I can look back and see things like that, but as a high school and college student, it wasn't in my mind that I was going to be a writer for a living at all, I kind of just fell into it.

Q: I have heard from others that it is a common experience to associate writing as something ‘just for school.’ It is not something many people do for fun. You might have a diary, but that's not ‘serious writing.’ Did you have any experiences like that too? Or did you get to do more creative writing? 

A: I remember doing a lot of projects and just creative projects on my own, nothing to do with school. I always felt that I was free to do that and I enjoy doing it. I do think that the way that writing is taught now is very backward. I see it in my kids, two kids in high school, and one in college. I've seen them go through school and I've seen the way that they write as well. We have a 500-word paper. And so they write to fill those 500 words and then they stop. What that does naturally is it creates a fatty content instead of lean content. Instead of saying like with Twitter you had, for a long time, we have what, 140 characters? Those kinds of constraints force you to really boil down your thoughts into what's the nugget of what you're trying to say. If I were teaching writing, I would much rather put harsh limits on, you can only write 300 words and what's it going to be?

There's this great scene in this movie called A River Runs Through It. That's an old Brad Pitt movie. And he's, the father. It's kind of a homeschooling thing. It's like 1920s Montana or something like that. The father is teaching his son how to write and his son is like eight years old or nine years old or something. He turns in his essay to his dad and his dad reads it and, kind of glasses down and he says, “Very good, cut it in half.” The son was like, oh my gosh. So he goes back for an hour or something and cuts a bunch of stuff out and then copies it off again. Brings a clean copy back to his dad, looks at it again. “Okay. Much better. Okay. Cut it in half again.” So he's teaching his son to really boil down, really getting out, get rid of unnecessary words and that's so much of what good writing is, is just getting out of your own way and boiling it down and getting rid of unnecessary stuff. That's probably the essence of it. 

Q: What was your experience with writing in college?

A: I can remember writing on my own in college, the stuff that had nothing to do with coursework. Essays, just sort of thoughts boiling up in my head, things I wanted to do, problems of the world that I wanted to solve. I don't know where that came from. I just would grab a spiral notebook at the time. This was long before personal computers and I was just writing longhand. I remember actually, funny story, one day I was in an apartment off-campus and I was so into what I was writing that I missed the first three days of class. I didn't know. I was so out of it and when I realized that I panicked, like, oh my gosh, I've missed the syllabus day. Finally, I got back to campus. That's kinda how, how intense that, that feeling was for me, that I was just writing on my own, and three days went by and I really didn't pull my head out of the sand and realize what I was missing.

Q: Do you feel like you're drawn towards writing about things that you've experienced or do you feel influenced by other writers?

A: I think it's a function of writers that I like and books that I like to read.  I've always read more nonfiction. The book on the stroke that I did, it's the old cliche about write what you know. I knew at that point, within 24 hours of having that stroke, I knew that was going to be my next book. That's going to be my source material for the next book, because I'm going to be neck-deep in this for who knows how long months, years, I didn't know at that point, but I knew that that was going to be my next book. Literally, within two weeks, I started dictating on this computer…into a Google doc. Okay. Weird stuff that was happening to me, funny stuff that would happen, and the book started to take shape right then and there.

I mean, I've kind of fallen into a pattern of doing these memoirs. I think I've done five now. And they've all been a little different. I mean, one of them was very, was a memoir that was kind of braided with high philosophical ideas. That was my very first book. I don't know what, what the future holds of course, but, there are certain themes. I keep returning to the outdoors. Now that I'm living with a stroke, that's kind of inherent in all of the non-fiction stuff I do. In some way religion, I'm very interested in. Even stuff that’s not explicitly religious, has religious themes or theological themes that find their way into it. So there are certain, there are certain things if you read all my books that you would start to see patterns and kind of ways that they, these themes braid themselves together.

Q: How do you balance your formal career at UT with your self-driven career writing books? How do you find this motivation to write?

A: In my case it's just kind of a default. I default to writing. It's not something I have to find the will to do or find the motivation to do. I found something that I default to and I mean, I guess that's the real key. Sometimes people ask me questions similar to this one or they've never written anything before and they're thinking about writing something and are asking my advice and I'm just like, don't be a writer if you don't feel it. I'm incapable of not writing.