The Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute (BMI) will host a reading and conversation with acclaimed science writer and essayist Sabrina Imbler at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, Mar. 11 at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. The reading will be followed by a conversation with Heather Wells Peterson, a writer and BMI Ph.D. Fellow. The event is free with RSVP and open to the public.
Sabrina Imbler is a staff writer at Defector, a worker-owned site, where they cover creatures and the natural world. Their first full-length book, How Far the Light Reaches, won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology. Their chapbook Dyke (geology) was selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Program. Sabrina lives in Brooklyn with their partner; cats Melon and Sesame; and a school of fish.
Imbler discussed their work, their writing process, and that viral anglerfish with Sabrina Shie, a writer and MFA student in the UNLV Creative Writing International Program, and BMI’s Joshua Chévere Cohen. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Sabrina Shie: Something that struck me about this essay collection is the consistent theme of imagining future possibilities of beautiful existence, not just for yourself, but for your family, for your communities, for these sea creatures. I also saw that, in the essay “We Swarm,” you reference Ross Gay who writes essays about finding joy as a personal daily practice. How have you cultivated a practice of imagining future possibilities for yourself?
Sabrina Imbler: When I was writing the book, I wrote it in a state of immense burnout and career instability. So, I think a lot of the practices that I've had I've developed since. Recently I started journaling, which, as everyone says, is amazing if you can force yourself to do it.
I'm very lucky that at my job at Defector, my beat is basically writing about non-human life. Every day I generally learn about a creature that I'm a little bit familiar with, and just learning about them and encountering the different body forms or symbiosis, or ways of moving throughout the world, I think, help expand my vision of what my own life can look like, and then in turn feed the personal writing that I do. So I think adjacency to the non-human has also really helped.
Shie: Are there any creatures you've been researching who have been particularly inspiring to you these days?
Imbler: There is this paper that just came out about this maggot, which is the technical term for the larva of a fly, that has evolved to have a face on its face. It has these two fake antennas, and these two little eye spots that are actually breathing holes, and this fly maggot resembles a termite. So this fly has basically evolved the ability to reside in termite colonies without being decapitated, as any other intruder would be. They've really evolved to just coexist with the termites, and take advantage of the resources. But the termites are clearly still doing fine, and I think I always find it charming when creatures have really committed to the bit of resembling another species. Evolution to me is often the most elaborate bit possible. It's like we spent millions and millions of years to look like a termite so that we can chill in this colony.
I don't think I’ve taken any personal lessons for my own life from that yet. But maybe they'll come. I think I just am really astounded by the creativity of evolution.
Shie: I was curious about your creative process because I’m also from the Bay Area and grew up in a similarly rigid academic kind of environment, so reading your essay collection felt relatable. It was cool to see someone else writing about their life growing up there, and they also have my name as well.
Imbler: Can I just ask quickly, do you know why your parents chose the name Sabrina?
Shie: Yes, but it's really funny, because I didn't find this out until I was 25, and I feel like my life would have turned out so differently if I had known the origin of my name. But it's from that Audrey Hepburn movie, Sabrina.
Imbler: Same!
Shie: That's so funny. It's funny because if you told me I was supposed to be Audrey Hepburn when I was 5, as opposed to 25, I feel like I would have moved through the world in a very different way.
Imbler: That's so funny. And very elegant, in a way.
Shie: In “Us Everlasting,” the last essay in this collection, you asked the question, “How shall you regrow, and in how many ways?” It's been 3 years since How Far the Light Reaches came out. How has your life regrown since its publication?
Imbler: Hmm! That's a really lovely question. I think when I turned in the draft of How Far the Light Reaches, we were in copy edits the summer of 2022, and I really felt both very exhausted, and also that this will be the last book that I'll ever write, because I've shared my whole life story, and that's it; I'm mature now. I think it was so funny how almost immediately after I had finished, sort of coinciding with me finishing the manuscript, was when I started actually medically transitioning and I went on testosterone. And then later, I got top surgery, and went through all these really big and exciting and important personal changes that I almost wasn't able to deal with when I was writing the book, even though the book is about this pursuit of becoming more aligned with who you are, and finding your community.
I really feel like I did so much personal growth immediately after writing the memoir, so that by the time the book came out, I was a different person. The cuttlefish essay, “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish,” talks about how you can't write an essay and expect it to be an everlasting record because we are constantly evolving.
Shie: In your new essay, “Key Changes,” in Orion Magazine, I really noticed that you have this signature empathy toward the cricket’s survival methods and toward understanding your own transformations. I was wondering if it was a recent development that you were focusing on bugs, or if you've always had that same reverence and interest toward bugs as marine life.
Imbler: Orion reached out to me in the fall of 2023. I was brainstorming with Sumanth Prabhaker, who was at the time the Editor-in-Chief, and Lulu Miller, who is guest editing the issue, and we were tossing ideas around and, at that time I knew that I wanted to do a bug book in some way. I felt really connected to bugs and I had been writing a lot about bugs at Defector for this series called “My Little Neighbors,” which is just about the creatures that are my neighbors, most of whom are bugs. That was a helpful iterative practice because I think part of what interested me about bugs is I've never had a relationship with them really beyond being grossed in many cases, whereas, like sea creatures, I've always just loved them unconditionally.
I've always looked at them through this framework of awe and respect and just being mesmerized by them. With bugs, I have a much more complicated relationship. That felt like a much more interesting next project: how can I write about creatures that actually challenge my own empathy, that make me feel feelings of disgust and fear? I was thinking about how the way that a lot of people react to bugs reminded me of the way that people react to certain vulnerable populations of people including trans people, of feeling like, well, I don't understand how this works, or I don't want these people or these beings in my community. It felt like a responsibility on my end, as a writer, to work through my own complicated feelings about bugs. It's a process of exercising my empathy.
Shie: On Instagram you wrote, “This is the first essay I've written since my book came out, and it felt sometimes like pulling my own teeth out.” I was wondering if you could talk a little more about what it was like returning to that narrative style.
Imbler: I had wanted to write about karaoke and how it’s really important to me, and I wanted to write about how my relationship to it was complicated. But then, when I tried to write the essay last spring, it felt impossible. I think the hardest part was working through my own insecurity around my writing, and also the pressure of, well, I came up with this book, and now it feels like I've forgotten how to write an essay, and so relearning to trust myself in that process was really difficult. But after I got that draft down, and so much of the credit for that draft goes to Tajja Isen, who was my editor for it and who’s just an amazing writer and editor, and really helped me unlock and untangle a lot of the problems I was having with it.
Shie: In school, your main area of study wasn't marine biology. How did you arrive at nature writing as a way of understanding your own life, even though that wasn't your area of study?
Imbler: As a child, like many kids, I wanted to be a marine biologist. And then I started going to school, and was like, I'm not very good at math and I don't think that is my calling, but I always felt this deep connection to sea creatures and the ocean just by virtue of growing up in California. My parents also took me and my sibling to Hawaii a lot as kids and I just was so awestruck by that biome, by snorkeling, by just the wonders of what, at the time to me, felt like the most beautiful place on earth.
Only when I started reading Ed Yong’s work at National Geographic, where he had this column called, “Not Exactly Rocket Science,” I was like, this is my dream job. Like you are a professional journalist and you're writing about the wonders of the world, the nonhuman wonders of the world. I realized I want to do that more than anything. So that's when I started writing this column at Catapult called “My Life in Sea Creatures,” which had a lot of the blueprints for the essays that are now in the collection.
When I started to write about animals, I found that I wanted to write about my life alongside theirs. At the beginning of the project I thought, oh, this will teach people about this cool octopus, and also, it'll be a chance for me to write a personal essay. I wasn't even mature enough to realize, in the act of writing about your own life alongside another, whether human or non-human, you will be changed in that process. Once I actually started that practice of putting the two together, that's when I really found that, it was a route to self discovery.
Joshua Cohen: Black Mountain Institute is hosting you at an event on March 11 at the Las Vegas Natural History Museum. As a writer who spends quite a bit of time with museum collections, how does that feel?
Imbler: I'm so excited! I love collections so deeply. I feel like the insects are the jewels of collections because you open a drawer and there's 600 wasps in this drawer, you know, whereas if you're looking at a skeleton of a mammoth, it's just one big mammoth. I hope there will be time for me to look around and appreciate the museum. It'll definitely be one of the coolest venues I've ever spoken at.
Cohen: What’s your take on the anglerfish that recently went viral online?
Imbler: My coworker Barry Petchesky actually wrote this sweet speculative fiction about her last moments and her moving toward the light. Deep sea fish come up occasionally, generally because they're dying. If you see something that close to the surface, it’s probably not doing well. When I saw the footage of the anglerfish, I immediately thought of that painting Truth Coming Out of Her Well. This anglerfish is here because the horrors are not down there, the horrors are up here.
My last take on the anglerfish situation is that I hate when newspapers are like “the fish of your nightmares rising up!” That's your own subjective experience of beauty. That fish looks like what it needs to look like, just like you look like what you need to look like. The footage is beautiful, of course; people are going to click on it. You don't need to insult the fish. Whose nightmares in this day and age are about anglerfish? Mine certainly are not.
