Tom Seeman Inspires Readers in 'All the Animals I Want to See: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Projects and Defying the Odds'

Author and businessman, Tom Seeman, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss his remarkable, new memoir, Animals I Want To See: A Memoir of Growing Up in the Projects and Defying the Odds. As one of 12 children, Seeman and his siblings grew up in an African-American community in the projects of Toledo, Ohio. While his family was poor and the streets were rough, he had an incredible mother who always went the extra mile for her family. He also had neighbors who accepted his family and showed them small acts of kindnesses, whether it was the man across the street who took him fishing or the small bites of meat they shared from their barbecue. Despite the many hardships his family endured, Seeman managed to find wonder in all of the things surrounding him. He reflected, “It’s primarily a happy book… I think it’s uplifting in the way that I looked at the world. I looked at the world with wonder my entire life… I would lift myself up after bad things and I saw wonder, for example, in the field behind our house, where I started to discover with my brothers that hey, if you lifted up this… it was a trash heap, the field, I didn’t see it as a trash heap… and so we would pick up a brick… and there would be a snake… and I began to keep a list of ‘Wild Animals I Have Seen’ and eventually I lost this list, and I started a new list… ‘Animals I Want to See One Day,’ and that’s where the title comes from, but for me, it’s like a metaphor for all of my hopes and dreams of success because how could a child in the projects, very young, expect to see animals in the wild one day? …I somehow had this outlook that I would achieve things that would somehow allow me to do this.”

Eventually, Seeman did see many of the animals he wrote on his list, and he continues to do so today. “…interestingly, my family, my kids, actually enjoy this… so we were in Panama and there was this very rare bird, the quetzal bird.. and so we were searching with the guide and finally found it, and I just remember everybody being thrilled even when they were pretty little then, looking through binoculars, ‘Daddy, I see it! I see it!’ …we always try to get to the point where we can see them in their own wild habitat.”

As a final thought, “If I was to sum it up, consider this act of kindness everyday or at least look back and recognize all the acts of kindness that were probably done for you, to a reader… and the last thing would be this sense of wonder that we all lose as we age, and to try to see, because we have so many things weighing on us and a lot of people think their life is very negative or it’s a dead end life or something, and I think you got to let some of that go and see some of the wonder. See the good things that you do have.”