Creativity helps Alumni Horizon Award winner overcome adversity

Alumni Horizon Award recipient Lauren Seal

When her first young-adult novel, Light Enough to Float, is released on Oct. 8, 2024, Lauren Seal, ’13 BA, will also hit — within days — an even bigger milestone.

That October day will mark five years since a tumour was found in her brain, and shortly thereafter removed.

“It means that I’m officially considered in remission — almost in the clear,” says the Faculty of Arts graduate. “After 10 years, I’ll be considered cured.”

Later that same month, Seal will receive the U of A’s Alumni Horizon Award, recognizing the outstanding professional achievements and contributions of recent graduates to the community.

Her future grows brighter with each passing day, but it hasn’t been an easy road. Seal spent years as a teenager struggling with anorexia nervosa, an eating disorder one never entirely escapes. Creative writing was one form of expression that brought her a degree of solace.

Seal met Gail Šobat, ’83 BEd, ’91 MA, in the U of A Hospital’s school for residents of Alberta Health Services’ eating disorder program. Šobat, a local author, English teacher and former U of A education instructor was a teacher at the school while Seal was in the residential program. Šobat also runs YouthWrite, summer camps for kids who like to write in any number of genres. She could see that Seal, then a Grade 9 student, had talent.

“What was remarkable about Lauren was her facility with language as a junior high student,” says Šobat. “She oozed potential, and I thought YouthWrite would be a wonderful opportunity for her — a conduit for finding her voice.”

“Gail got me doing more writing than they assigned at the school,” says Seal. “She just kept saying, ‘You’re really good at this, you need to do this. And you need to go to YouthWrite.’”

As a resident in the eating disorder program, Seal hadn’t been with kids her own age in months. She was convinced her anxiety would stand in the way of getting through a week of camp. But as soon as she arrived, her anxiety began to subside as she felt — in some ways — more at home and more self-assured than ever.

After graduating from high school in Spruce Grove, Alta., she enrolled in English and creative writing in the Department of English and Film Studies.

“That’s when I learned about the editing process,” she says. “Before I would just write things down and be like, ‘OK, there it is.’ But I was forced to look more closely and say, ‘This works, but this doesn’t.’ Or I need to completely rearrange things around the one idea that did work.”

Seal also recalls almost failing an English paper because she didn’t properly cite sources. Her professor wouldn’t deduct marks this time, he told her, but she was technically guilty of plagiarism.

“I thought, what the heck? How did I not know that — nobody taught me this, so I had to teach myself.”

The misstep ended up inspiring a career in library science.

“I remember learning proper research and thinking, ‘This is so cool.’ My brain just likes keywords and search puzzles. I got this rush when I found a paper that perfectly fit what I was researching. I thought, ‘How did I even find this?’”

After graduating from the U of A in 2013 with her bachelor of arts, she went on to McGill University for a master’s degree in library science, eventually landing a job in the Alberta Health Services library as the northern Alberta cancer liaison librarian, fielding research requests on cancer.

Around that time, she started struggling with poor sleep, frequent headaches and nausea. Much to her dismay, she was also struck with bouts of aphasia: “I just felt like I was going crazy, and my mental health was not good again. I understood things being said to me, but I couldn’t get my words out.”

She was diagnosed with a massive tumour in her skull, a slow-growing Grade 1 chondrosarcoma, often called a bone cancer, but which originates in tissues that support the cartilage. Doctors told her she’d had it for at least 10 years — possibly her whole life. When it occurs in the skull, it typically grows at the base, but in Seal’s case it affected her frontal lobe.

The doctor told her surgery could damage her speech. “I remember telling him, ‘I’m writing a book, and communication is my job!’”

But she had no choice — the tumour had to come out. When she awoke after surgery, one of the first things she did was reach for a book.

“One of the nurses walked by and gave me a look. I was like, ‘What’s wrong?’ She said, ‘It’s just that we don’t ever see patients reading in here.’”

That triggered yet another epiphany. “I was told I might have issues communicating, and now I don’t. That means I have to take myself seriously, and I have to take the writing seriously.”

She hasn’t looked back. She finished the first draft of her novel in verse form, Light Enough to Float, while still on medical leave, and found an agent who pitched the book to Penguin Random House in the United States, which was just launching a new imprint for mental health and wellness content for children and young adults.

Drawing on her own experiences, the fictional tale follows a young woman, Evie, through her eating disorder treatment and recovery — a challenging story to get right, says Seal.

“I knew people with eating disorders were going to read it, and if I wasn’t careful, it could be triggering,” she says. “I did what I could to make it the least harmful book for a teenager who’s ill and going through this stuff.”

She also strove to be realistic about the chances of fully recovering from an eating disorder. “You see Evie start to make strides, and then she self-sabotages, so her journey is up and down,” rather than unequivocally triumphant, says Seal.

In 2022, Seal was appointed poet laureate of St. Albert, a year after accepting a position at the city’s public library, where she is responsible for children’s programming. But as in many libraries these days, she also helps people in the community look for basic information or provides help with literacy skills.

“We had a big uptick in Ukrainian refugees looking for help learning English, or to have immigration papers scanned or printed off,” she says. “Some just wonder where we keep the food pantry.”

In her spare time, Seal co-directs with Šobat the Spoken Word Youth Choir, which is an offshoot of YouthWrite that she first joined at 14. The group performs dramatic productions, often of their own poetry.

Now 33, Seal says there are moments when she has to pinch herself, like when she was appointed poet laureate, or the day this summer when she got to sit in on the audition to choose the actor, Shannon Tyo, who will narrate the audio version of her book.

Another such moment was finding out she won the U of A Alumni Horizon Award, another milestone she regards as a validation of sorts after more than her fair share of misfortune.

“It means I’m probably on the right track, that I took a good bet on myself when I decided I was going to take writing seriously.”