Seegmueller brings love of outdoors to publications

ALBANY — When Herald Publisher Scot Morrissey started talking in earnest about a regular outdoors feature page in the new-look Albany Herald and a glossy magazine to connect with the many hunters and anglers in the region, he asked my thoughts on writers who could tell the stories sought by what he called “hook and bullet lovers” in the region.

My mind went immediately to Tom Seegmueller.

A native Albanian, Seegmueller was raised in the outdoors — not to the point that he was unfamiliar with indoor plumbing … but close. His father taught him gun safety at a young age, and he had any number of “adopted uncles” who regularly took him hunting and fishing. He also was a gung-ho Scout, completing his first paddle from Albany to Apalachicola at age 11.

”What I’ve found is that by being in the outdoors, you always see something new and moving, something to comfort your soul,” Seegmueller said.

In addition to his time spent outdoors, Seegmueller also found himself a connoisseur of outdoors literature when he was forced to stay inside.

“It’s kind of become a lost art, but I grew up reading and collecting outdoors literature,” he said. “I read Sports Afield, Outdoor Life, those kinds of magazines, and I must have read Robert Raurk’s ‘The Old Man and the Boy’ 30 or 40 times over the years. It teaches a lot of life lessons, including conservation.”

Seegmueller spent his formative years hunting dove, quail, squirrel, rabbit, coyote, deer, hogs, duck, pheasant, snipe, and woodcock. When he became his own man, he took the lessons he’d learned of the outdoors — both in the woods and in the pages of books — and focuses them on his own budding writing career.

”It just felt like something I wanted to do,” Seegmueller said. “And if it hadn’t been for the encouragement of men like Bobby Dews, Jimmy Jacobs and Vic Miller, who told me to stick with it, we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

As his relationship with words grew more passionate, Seegmueller wrote for such publications as Albany Magazine, Southwest Georgia Living, GON, Georgia Outdoor Adventures, Georgia Sportsman, Alabama Sportsman, Quail Unlimited Magazine, The Albany Herald and On the Fly South. During this period, he won a variety of state awards for writing and photography.

”I’ve had somewhere between 200 and 300 articles published,” Seegmueller said. “I look at these challenges as a way of giving back what people shared with me over the years. Each assignment gives me an opportunity to do something I might not have been able to do if I were not writing.

”I’m afraid outdoors writing is becoming a dying art. I see myself as something of a historian, so I enjoy researching the history of our regional practices and traditions related to hunting, fishing, ecology, and the politics of these topics. I’m always grateful for the opportunity to do my part to keep this important part of our culture alive.”

Seegmueller and some of his rowdy friends who are renowned for the passion they share for the outdoors will be among the contributors to The Albany Herald’s weekly Outdoors page and to the Outdoors magazine expected to hit newsstands in the spring. It is, most would agree, a perfect match.

File Photo: Carlton Fletcher