📚️🏳️‍⚧️✨ "None of us do anything alone..." —Sabrina Imbler

A conversation with Sabrina Imbler on sea creatures, queer bodies, and re/building glittering community. [Being Alive Book Club Recap]

February was a short month with chilling headlines and, at least here in NYC, very chilly temperatures. If you read this month’s book selection, How Far the Light Reaches, you learned about the yeti crabs that cling together in the pockets of warmth that emerge from hydrothermal vents along the ocean floor. From now on, no matter how dark and cold it gets, I will imagine our Being Alive Book Club nights as a deep-sea oasis.

Wondering what in the world I’m talking about? Keep reading. Our conversation earlier in the week with writer Sabrina Imber was tender, inspiring, and wide-ranging. For those of you who haven’t read the book yet and are ready to dive in, there’s a special offer at the end of this post.

And check your inboxes tomorrow for all the details for March’s book club pick.

xx Kyle

Note: This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. Book club members are identified with their first initial.

Writer Sabrina Imbler mesmerized the Being Alive Book Club crew.

Kyle: Welcome. I'm here with Sabrina Imbler, staff writer at Defector Media and the author of How Far the Light Reaches, which is our official book tonight, and Dyke (geology), a chapbook I'm obsessed with. Sabrina writes a newsletter, Creatures NYC, on how to see wildlife in New York City. They are joining us from Brooklyn, where they live with their partner, cats, and fish. And, Sabrina, you have a brand new essay on crickets?

Sabrina: Thank you for having me, Kyle. I do have a new essay on crickets, and it is unfortunately only in print right now in Orion Magazine, but I think they're going to put it online in a couple of weeks.

Kyle: I can’t wait to talk creatures and queer bodies with you. I found your chapbook thanks to the lovely booksellers at Books Are Magic, who had placed it at the register. I was hooked by the first sentence, only to then read a paragraph that starts with a volcano and ends with lesbian bed death! I went back the next day and bought How Far the Light Reaches. My copy is full of notes and marginalia, but I thought we should start by grounding in the timeframe that you were writing, because the book has been out for a couple of years.

Sabrina: I started writing the essays that would develop into How Far the Light Reaches in 2017. I had published a bunch of them online at this website called Catapult, which is now, unfortunately, no longer in existence. They were very internetty essays like "What a starving octopus teaches me about my relationship with my mother." I sold the book in 2019 and finished writing it in 2021. It was definitely a long process, and I did a lot of personal evolution during that writing process.

Kyle: You were finishing the book while the rest of us were learning how to wear masks.

Sabrina: It was tricky. I had this horrible job, and I was supposed to go on book leave in March of 2020. I had all these trips planned to go and meet some of the creatures that would be in the book, and of course, none of those trips happened. I had to cancel all of them. Then I was depressed because I thought, "How can I write this book, and also what's going to happen to the world?" I wrote the majority of it during the pandemic, and it was really difficult.

I think the pandemic was a moment where I had to confront my own internal politics and move into a different space, really challenging my assumptions of the world. The book is better off having been written by someone who was living in New York during the pandemic. But it kind of gave me a writing residency because I was laid off, though I was also depressed.

Kyle: I wonder what kind of book it would have been if you had done those trips.

Sabrina: I know, me too.

Kyle: For folks who haven't read it, how would you describe it?

Sabrina: I'd say a memoir-in-essays, from the shallows to the deep.

Kyle: I lost track of how many creatures! Has anyone ever done an infographic of all of the creatures that you mention in the book?

Sabrina: No, that would be so special. There are 10 sea creatures featured in the essays; one is a goldfish, unfortunately, so it's not technically a sea creature. But there are so many other little guys that pop up, and it would be so special to see all of them.

Kyle: It was hard to pick which section to ask you to read tonight, but I decided on “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish.” I like its theme of embodiment.

Sabrina read a selection of “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish” from the origin of ‘sepia’ as a color to showering in the dark.

Kyle: It is such a pleasure to hear you read these words. So much of the entire book is captured in that selection. You said you’ve never read this out loud at an event. What is it like to read a story you wrote years ago about morphing? I doubt you stopped morphing.

Sabrina: I mean, I don’t know if you anyone in this room can tell, but I wrote a lot of this book when I was extremely burnt out from my job, and I think I had very little brain space to devote to self-discovery, which is kind of stupid considering I was writing a memoir. And then, as soon as I turned in the manuscript, I was like, “Maybe I should start testosterone.” And then a year later, “Maybe I should get top surgery like that’d be crazy.” And then I did both of those things. And it’s very tender to return to this essay. It’s very sweet to revisit this old self that was still very unsure and very nervous as to what evolution would be next.

Kyle: I have tears in my eyes hearing you talk about that decision leading to “I’m finally going to do that thing.” There are so many examples of people using photographs to document their in-between moments. It’s really beautiful how you captured with words the experience of showing in the dark. I had never heard anyone cope with their own disassociation or discomfort in that way. Before we continue, can you explain what a cuttlefish is? I didn't know what it was until your book.

Sabrina: A cuttlefish is a close relative of an octopus. It's also a cephalopod, so squid, cuttlefish, octopus, and things like vampire squid are all related. Cuttlefish, I think, are one of the sea creatures capable of the most radical transformation physically. They can change the color of their skin and the texture of their skin. They have little muscly sacs called papillae, and they can squeeze them so they appear really bumpy, or loosen them so they're very smooth.

They can not just change the color of their skin, but create patterns like stripes that appear to move across their body like a conveyor belt. They're really remarkable creatures. And most importantly, they're very cute.

The illustration of this particular cuttlefish in the book is displaying a pattern called "splotch," which scientists discovered. They have different patterns they'll put on to hunt prey or scare away other cuttlefish, and this specific pattern is one that only female cuttlefish use with other female cuttlefish. It seems to be a way of saying, "Hey, you're okay, I'm not going to fight you." In the essay, I remember when I learned about this, I was like, that's just like the gay nod where I'm like, "Hey, I see you, you see me, we're going to keep doing our own thing."

Kyle: I’m ready to go the aquarium now. All through the book you create these incredible metaphors connecting human creatures and other creatures. A couple of book club members wrote in with questions asking how you did this. Did you come up with all your themes first, and then the sea creatures? Was it like a murder board, where you were matching them up?

Sabrina: The first essay that formed the blueprint of the book is about the deep-sea octopus who brooded her eggs for 4.5 years without eating. I was working as an intern at a job that paid me like $10 an hour, so I got this second job where I wrote clickbait about the ocean for $50 an article. That's how I learned about this octopus, and I remember being so stunned by her story. It was captivating.

We think about octopuses as very intelligent creatures that can solve puzzles and open jars and play games. To imagine what it must be like to have that intelligence that is so recognizable to our own, and to just starve and be alone in the deep sea for that long felt very scary to me. I didn't have the opportunity to write about her at my job, so I just thought about her for a year.

I eventually realized that maybe I was still stuck on her story because she was bringing up emotions I had about my own relationship with my mother and the sacrifices she made, or my own relationship to starvation and disordered eating. I thought, what if I try to write an essay where I put our lives together and see what resonances appear? I was really happy with how that essay turned out.

I wondered what else I could braid together. I had a highly scientific T-chart, where on one side I put sea creatures I was really interested in—whales, yeti crabs, sea slugs. On the other side, I put things from my own life that I wanted to write about. By putting these things side by side, I was able to make connections that wouldn't have come naturally. It was a helpful exercise to see: alright, crabs, queer nightlife, maybe these things can connect. Some connections I made didn't actually end up working out, and I had to toss those essays. Some other essays emerged because I just had an organic encounter with that animal.

K: How did it feel to write about the suffering of sea creatures in comparison to your own painful experiences?

Sabrina: That's such a good question, and I've never been asked it before. In many ways, they were both very difficult. In my day job as a science journalist, I often spend time with really tragic stories about sea creatures or other animals. I recently wrote about the killer whale Tahlequah who lives in the Southern resident population, who had another calf which also died, and then she carried the body of that calf again. I think I built up more of an emotional scaffolding for these stories. It's important to tell them, so I'll dive in, tell it, and dive out.

I think it was really difficult for me, and I was not prepared to do that with my own experiences. I really didn't take care of myself when I was writing about the trauma in this book, specifically for the essay about the sand striker in which I talk about experiences of sexual assault that happened when I was blacked out. I would go into my Facebook and look at messages, and I was not taking care of myself. I was nervous to do that, so I would drink to get my courage up to look at those messages. And it was the pandemic; it was not a safe space.

Since the editing process, and since the book has come out, I've learned a lot more about how to take care of yourself. I've also gotten sober, which was amazing. One of the best pieces of advice I got about writing about your own trauma is to know that there's no moral equation to putting more trauma in and the essay becoming better—that isn't one-to-one.

Also, you can have different versions of the same piece. You can have a version that just sits with you and all of those traumas or experiences—they inform what you want to say. Then there can be a published version where you don't share anything that you don't want to say.

I also heard advice shared by the writer Terese Marie Mailhot, who wrote the book Heart Berries, which is a memoir very much about her own trauma. She basically said if you're going to write about your trauma, make an exit route for if you hit a nerve or suddenly feel unsafe. Once you're in that space and you're like, "Oh no, I feel raw, I don't feel safe," you can take a bath, or watch Survivor, or go for a walk with your dog.

Now, when I try to write about trauma, I always have that little treat or thing where I'm not pressuring myself to dig as deep as I possibly can or produce as much as I possibly can. And I know that if I decide I don't want to go there, I don't have to go there.

Kyle: I just have to say, you are braver than I to go head-first into really difficult things and put beautiful words around them. I also just read your piece about Sam Nordquist’s murder here in New York.

Sabrina: I feel really grateful to work somewhere that lets me take a week to process. When I first found out about Sam Nordquist's murder, I was just really unmoored. I felt numb, I was spiraling, and I wasn't in a place to write. I didn't even know what to think beyond fear and grief. I feel grateful to work somewhere that lets you take the time you need. After a week, I realized there had been no piece saying what I think is really obvious, and I wanted to say it.

S: What memoirists or writers did you look to either through the writing process or since that have inspired you?

Sabrina: I really think Chanel Miller's memoir Know My Name is such a beautiful book. I'm a big audiobook person—I love the audiobook because she reads it, and it feels so intimate. I was listening to it weeping while walking from a Walgreens.

That was a transformative book. It was the book that allowed me to name what happened to me as sexual assault, because I felt so much shame around the fact that I didn't remember it. How can I say it was wrong or not?

Other memoirs I loved include T. Kira Madden's Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls. It's another memoir of growing up biracial, Asian, and queer. She's such a fantastic prose stylist, and it was an incredible example of a memoir that was not chronological and not simply told. We're getting these shards of her life that are all so vivid, and the way she writes about her trauma is beautiful and very often funny.

If you liked my book, you might like Why Fish Don't Exist by Lulu Miller, another memoir about someone coming out as queer and loving fish, but also an exploration of a scientist who turns out to be kind of evil. What I appreciated most about that book was how vulnerable Lulu was about decisions she made that she regrets.

The last book I'll mention is The Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn, which is a memoir about his experiences as a trans masculine person who lives with chronic illness or chronic pain, his experience of his body and disability, and also various rivers, Russia, and antiquity. It's a very structurally complicated book, and as I read it, I realized he's making moves that I'm still paging back to understand. It's a really lovely and very well-researched memoir that brings in so many surprising sources.

Kyle: I want to talk a little bit about community. I kept tagging all the places you talk about community in these really beautiful ways. There's a line I keep repeating from the end of "Pure Life": “Oases here, where so few things are certain, inevitably blink on and off, but life always finds a place to begin anew, and communities in need will always find one another and invent new ways to glitter together in the dark.”

Sabrina: "Pure Life" is an essay about these deep-sea decapods that resemble crabs called yeti crabs. They live by hydrothermal vents, which are areas like gaps in the seafloor where geothermally heated water rises up and creates these oases of heat. While most of the deep sea is a hair above freezing, the vent itself is like 700°F, but the water surrounding it is like 70 degrees—it's a great place to live. Most of the deep sea is very empty, but by hydrothermal vents, it's just creatures living on top of each other.

It's an essay about a time when I moved to Seattle and had a really hard time and found a home in queer nightlife. I compare the community I found in that nightlife space to these crabs, one species of which actually dances with its claws, waving them back and forth because it has symbiotic bacteria on its claws that use chemosynthesis. The crabs are basically farming the bacteria on their claws and eating it, and to make sure the bacteria is thriving, they have to wave their claws back and forth. So I was like, they're dancing, I'm dancing—the perfect match.

Kyle: I love this essay so much. What does queer community feel like for you in this moment?

Sabrina: I came out in my senior year of college, so after I graduated, a lot of my friends from college were straight, and I didn't really have a lot of queer community that I'd built up over the years. When I moved to new cities, I really wanted to learn from other people and make queer friends.

I felt so blessed and welcomed at these various queer spaces. I didn't know anyone there, but I would show up, and it would feel like home, that universal language of queerness that existed no matter what city I was in, whether I was with strangers or friends.

Something that became very clear to me in writing this book, and really just thinking about how life works on land or in the sea, is that none of us do anything alone, and we all depend on each other; we need each other to thrive so that we can thrive.

As I was learning about the interconnected nature of different species in the ocean, I was also thinking about how I can become more entangled in my communities in New York. How can I become more entangled with my neighbors? How can we build up these safety nets? Because many of us don't have family that will be that safety net, so how can we show up for each other? How can we make these new bonds that are stronger than blood or different than blood?

I really took heart in finding lessons from these sea creatures that live in communities very similar to my own—all these crabs piling on top of each other in the dark is like a club. Or an animal like a salp, which is both an individual and a chain of clones of itself, so it's both an individual and a community.

That animal was really helpful for me thinking about what if I really did imagine my life as being truly connected to others around me? When do I feel like I'm part of a superorganism? There were lots of lessons of community in the creatures I was writing about.

L: The sand striker essay really touched me. Most of all as a mother—I have two little boys, and we're already talking about consent. That lesson at the conclusion of the essay; I want my boys to be those men who find the girl and take her home and put her to bed. It was always an intention I've had in my heart for my boys, but the essay really buoyed me even more. As a woman, and as a girl who went through awful blacked-out experiences of my own, I feel really inspired and passionate to pass on that knowledge to the next generation.

Sabrina: Thank you. I'm so glad you're passing on those lessons to your boys—you're really setting them up for a lot of care.

A: I was curious about your process of deciding what to include about your mom, and if she's read the book. How has that conversation continued?

Sabrina: My mom has read—I don't think she's read the whole book, but I sent the essay that is about her to her. I waited to finish writing it so that I felt like I was saying what I wanted to say, and then I was so nervous. I thought I would send it to her and she would say, "You can't publish this," and then I would have to come up with a new essay.

Luckily, she was very open to it, and it spawned a conversation where she said, "These are the parts that I remember differently." That was really helpful because writing a memoir, you're never actually writing the truth—you're writing from your memory. My memory had been skewed and biased in all these ways where I didn't want to admit how I had sought out diet culture. It was really helpful for us to talk that through.

I ended up revising several sections and adding a paragraph where her doctor said she was gaining too much weight while pregnant because she was eating too much Chinese food, and she told him to fuck himself. I thought, "That's amazing, I have to put that in there."

It was both helpful editorially to process this with her, and it helped us have a conversation that would have been much harder to have otherwise. I had tried to have conversations like that over the years, but she had really shut it down.

Anyone who was in the book substantively, or even not substantively, who I wanted to maintain a relationship with, I would send them the essay or section and ask how they felt about it. No one really vetoed anything—people would sometimes correct things.

The funniest or most beautiful result was in the first essay, the goldfish essay. I had written this ending about an ex that I hadn't seen in several years. I was like, "They're about to get the craziest email from me." I was so scared to send it—I couldn't figure out another way to end the essay without talking about our relationship. But I sent it to them, and they said, "This is really beautiful. Would you want to catch up?" Now we're friends again, and we went on a trip with my partner and their partner. It can be beautiful to have the hard conversations sometimes.

E: Hi, I’m a senior in college and found your book through a Twitter list of books someone had read through the year. I read it and was immediately captivated. My question is: were there particular things that you really wanted to bring into your writing about your intersectionality, particularly your Asian and queer identity?

Sabrina: When I formulated a lot of this book around 2019, I think I had broken myself up into a lot of different identities. So many of the essays are sort of like, "This is the mixed-race chapter, this is the grandma chapter, this is the body chapter."

The big theme that speaks to intersectionality is how the natural world has this urge to categorize everything according to taxonomy, saying "This is where you belong, this is your name." Writing the butterflyfish chapter about being biracial and looking to these hybrid butterflyfish that are literal hybrids of two different species and don't have scientific names—they don't really exist aside from these moments of serendipity—I feel like that was really helpful, not just for thinking about my racial identity, but also for my queerness.

When I was trying to write the cuttlefish chapter, I was so stressed. I don't know if you can tell in the essay, but I was stressed thinking, "I have to either decide that I'm going to go on testosterone or I can't." At the time, I didn't even really identify as trans until later in the writing of the book.

Both the hybrid butterflyfish and the cuttlefish gave me a lot of permission to say I don't need to be thinking about labels, classification, or categorization. I just need to be thinking about what feels right about my body, what feels right about my community. Those two essays, in my mind, really speak to each other about resisting labels.

Kyle: I wanted to close with a bit about futures. You end the book with an essay called "Us Everlasting," which has this beautiful story about immortal jellyfish that regenerate. And then you weave other people’s second-life stories. What kind of imaginations of futures are you looking at? And do they relate to any creatures?

Sabrina: "Us Everlasting" is my pet favorite of the book—it was the last essay I wrote. Part of the reason why I wove other people into it is that when I was writing it, I thought, "This essay is going to be so easy." The initial version reimagined my past alongside this jellyfish that can revert back to adolescence and grow up again.

In the process of writing the book, when I turned to that essay, I was like, "I'm so sick of writing about myself, and I cannot go back to high school one more time. Imagine if I wrote this whole book and we're back in high school and I wanted to ask someone else to prom"—that didn't feel like it worked.

My editor approved my idea, which was, "What if I try to just crowdsource some imaginations?" I'm so grateful to every friend and the strangers who responded to my Twitter callout. I appreciated that the essay ended on this exploding of perspectives—this has been largely a memoir, but now we're going to other lives, other possibilities.

Something I've been thinking about a lot recently is the idea of radical imagination—thinking about imagination as a necessity for political action. Looking at existing structures that govern our country, our lives, our work, our healthcare, and being able to imagine beyond them. What is a structure that would provide more care, more support? The hard part of that work is imagining, but imagination is such a wonderful prompt.

I'm working on a second book about bugs, and I'm hoping to look to bugs for much more explicit lessons about politics, moving throughout the world, or trying to understand the world around me in addition to myself. I'm definitely looking to creatures for lessons, but trying to always ground myself in imagination, because it can be hard to write how things work and hard to imagine what things could be. There's no better place to look than the non-human world, because they're doing things so differently from us—and in many ways better. I'm always trying to look to invertebrates, vertebrates, anything non-human for ways we can live better lives.

Kyle: Sabrina, before we let you go, part of the Being Alive Book Club is an honorarium that I give to all our guests. Last month we were supporting Advocates for Trans Equality. This month, I'm going to give you the floor to talk about who you are supporting.

Sabrina: I'm going to divide the honorarium up between some of the JPays of incarcerated firefighters who are fighting the fires in LA. There are very few opportunities for people who are incarcerated to make money, and the firefighters make like a dollar an hour, or maybe a dollar extra if they're working in hazardous conditions. I was grateful for someone who identified the names of the firefighters and found their JPays, as a way of thanking them for their truly lifesaving work in the climate crisis.

The prison system is deeply fucked up. I'm learning a lot about that because I recently started corresponding with an incarcerated pen pal through the Prison Correspondence Project, which I really recommend if anyone is looking for ways to become involved or find a connection with someone who is incarcerated.

To send money to someone who is incarcerated, you generally have to send it through JPay, which is just this website that is difficult to use, and you need to know their ID. JPay takes a commission from every dollar that you send, which is again really fucked up. But I have just recently learned how to use JPay, so that is how I will be sending them the money.

Kyle: Thank you, Sabrina. It is an honor for all of us to talk with you. I feel deeply educated on so many levels after reading your book and spending time with you.

🚨🐟📚✨ Book Offer!

A member of the book club is offering up her copies of January’s Tomorrow Will be Different (Sarah McBride) and How Far the Light Reaches. Catherine wants you to know they are in a “loved” condition—but sometimes, isn’t that the best? To flip through a copy someone else has enjoyed, too?

If you are interested, drop a comment which book you request. I’ll draw names from an actual hat mid-week (so get those requests in by Wednesday EOD.) Then I’ll connect you to Catherine for shipping logistics. (Free for you!)

For more Sabrina Imbler, check out:

• Sabrina Imbler’s writing in The Defector

• Newsletter: Creatures NYC

• Instagram: simbler

• Blue Sky: @sabs.bksy.social