How Far the Light Reaches 🐟
an interview with Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches
I first encountered Sabrina Imbler’s writing in The New York Times, specifically “Started Out as a Fish. How Did It End Up Like This?“—an article I read, shared with the group chat, and then immediately went back and read again. The article explores how a scientific illustration of Tiktaalik, an ancient fish who shimmied onto land for unknown reasons, became a meme about late capitalism and human misery. Like all my favorite writing, it reveals the hidden depth behind something that appears silly and inconsequential.
Sabrina writes about animals--how they change and evolve to survive--in order to illuminate the trickiest of human experiences. They are the author of Dyke (geology), a chapbook, and How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, a book that braids together science writing and memoir to make sense of a disastrous first queer relationship, the generational curse of disordered eating, and non-binary and multi-racial identity. Their work is hopeful, perceptive, and oftentimes very funny.
Sabrina and I met up via GoogleDoc to discuss How Far the Light Reaches, Tamora Pierce books, the false binary of nature/cities, and so much more. I left this conversation with a list of books to request from the library, as well as a newfound appreciation for Guy Fieri and sea slugs. Sound off in the comments with your favorite denizen of the deep.
Maddy: Hi Sabrina! Thank you so much for coming on my newsletter. There are many moments in How Far the Light Reaches when you point out the ways that people in cities still encounter wildlife and the natural world. I was especially taken by the chapter about Riis Beach as this joyful, life-giving space for you and your queer community in New York, but also a place to encounter sea creatures like horseshoe crabs, a beached whale, and a massive colony of salps. I think a lot of people view cities and nature as direct opposites of each other. There’s this narrative that if you live in a city and want to experience nature, you have to leave and go camping in a national park or someplace really far away. I’m wondering if you can talk more about the city/nature binary, or the experience of encountering sea creatures and other things I would categorize as “serious nature” in a city?
Sabrina: Hi Maddy! Thank you for inviting me on T.V. Dinner. You’re totally right, and for many years I was one of those people who considered cities and nature to be total opposites. I think this stemmed from the fact that the nature documentaries I watched growing up never showed any people and often focused on the far-flung, often inaccessible swaths of “untouched” nature remaining on Earth, regions that of course were already endangered by development and agriculture and other human threats. As a child, I felt overwhelming grief, anger, and guilt in thinking about how I was implicated in the endangerment of so many species, and I thought the best thing I could wish for these creatures would be wilderness free from people. I didn’t know then that I had unknowingly adopted this harmful, colonialist mentality of fortress conservation, which imagines nature as naturally free from humans. As if we are not a part of nature! This idea has been wielded around the world to violently displace Indigenous Peoples who lived sustainably alongside nature and other animals. It’s true that national parks are good for wildlife, and it’s also true that all our national parks are on Native land, and people don’t live there anymore because they were forcibly removed.
I grew up in California near a bounty of national parks and huge, desolate beaches, and when I first moved to New York City, I spent the first few years here yearning for that kind of nature. I saw birds, of course, as well as rats and bodega cats, but it seemed out of the question that I would see any kind of sea creature living its best life at Riis, a beach where you could fill a hot tub with the sheer number of White Claws on the gay end. But the more I went to Riis, the more sea creatures I saw—horseshoe crab husks, a purple jellyfish, the heaps and heaps of salps I wrote about. I realized these were not anomalies, wayward animals lost from some true and untouched wilderness, but the creatures who share the beach with us every day, and remained there when we humans left. And once I started thinking about Riis as a wild space in the city, the more wildlife I noticed. I’ve yet to see the Riis dolphins—I am deeply jealous of my friends who have—but this summer I’ve been showing all of my friends the Riis bean clams, which are much easier and more reliable to spot. They’re these pebble-size clams sprinkled on the shore that continually dig themselves back into the sand with their milky, muscular foot. If you sit in the swash zone where the waves meet the sand, you can see hundreds of bean clams point their marbled shells toward the sun and dig furiously, almost like synchronized swimmers. You can pick them up and watch them dig into the sand in your hand. They’re so beautiful, the bean clams.
Riis has really taught me that serious nature is all around us city-dwellers. While it’s obviously cool to see a hawk from your office window, a humpback whale from the ferry, or a cloud of bats erupting from the trees on an evening in the park, it’s also a reminder that these ecosystems are just as important to protect as ones hundreds of miles away from any human. They’re the ones we depend on, too. The creatures of New York might not be conventionally attractive or ostentatious enough to star in nature documentaries, but they’re the ones who happen to be my neighbors, and remembering that they are there makes me a better neighbor to them. I hope the city continues to be a home to all of us.
M: In the opening chapter, you write about an incident where your middle school-self was asked to leave Petco for standing in the goldfish section and informing customers that it’s cruel to keep goldfish in tiny bowls. I also felt deep empathy towards animals as a kid (I was obsessed with this American Girl book series about kids who volunteer at a vet office/animal rescue called Wild at Heart and went through a phase of sequestering myself in the bathroom during meals because I knew people food was bad for my dog, and didn’t want him to feel disappointed that I wasn’t sharing.) Why do you think queer kids feel such a resonance with animals, especially mistreated and misunderstood ones?
S: Oh my heart is swelling at the image of you eating solo meals in the bathroom to make sure your dog wouldn’t feel excluded! I really get that—the looks my cats give me when I’m eating make me wish I could share. I can only speak for myself, but I think as a kid I often felt excluded from social spaces, which I chalk up to a combination of race and a budding queerness and transness. Maybe part of me envied the animals because they all seemed at home in their bodies. Is there such a thing as an insecure lobster? I envied fish that got to live in coral reefs and newts that live in verdant ponds, while I had to live in a dreary suburb. Like many queer kids, I watched a lot of Animal Planet growing up. Shows like The Most Extreme often framed the stranger animals as bizarre or grotesque but often left me in a constant state of awe. How incredible was it that animals whose bodies and lifestyles were so different from my own lived near me, even on my face! I didn’t know then I was queer, but I did often feel like there was something fundamentally wrong with me, and I felt a kinship for these tapeworms and Greenland sharks that were being roasted for being strange and ugly. That’s how I perceived myself!
I recently reread one of my favorite childhood books: Tamora Pierce’s quartet The Immortals, about a girl named Daine who can shapeshift into various animals. As a kid, I wished more than anything I could have that kind of power, not just to be around animals but to know what it was like to actually be a fish or a bird or a wolf. Imagining yourself into the body of someone else, human or animal, is not just empathetic, it’s world-expanding. Reading and writing about the lives and experiences of animals has unfolded so many new ways of knowing the world that I never knew existed: ways of navigating, sensing, seeing, communicating that rely on organs I don’t have, elements my human body can’t access. (My thinking of this has been immeasurably shaped by icon Ed Yong and his latest book, An Immense World.) I think this practice of stepping outside myself has been one of the throughlines of my queerness—both trying to unlearn what I was told was undesirable or wrong and also to better understand people whose experiences I may not directly share but whose struggles and dreams are aligned with mine. So I think we, queer kids and adults, look to animals not just out of recognition, wanting to see ourselves in them, but also as portals to alternative ways of life we may have thought were beyond our grasp.
M: Oh wow, I really relate to feeling strange and ugly and also motoring through the Tamora Pierce oeuvre. I loved Tamora Pierce books in middle school. I was also really into Animorphs, a book series where a mismatched group of tweens encounter an alien who gives them the power to communicate telepathically and transform into animals. My favorite scenes were the ones where the Animorphs were discovering and adjusting to their new, animal bodies. Also the telepathic dialogue was written with angle brackets <<example>> instead of quotation marks, which I thought was SO COOL.
Speaking of kids and animals as world-expanding, the first PowerPoint presentation I ever made was in my 2nd grade computer class and it was called Manatees. In 4th grade, my class spent the entire year assembling binders of animal reports categorized by reptiles, birds, fish, and mammals. I think animal reports are how most kids learn to conduct and synthesize research for the first time, as well as write essays and give presentations. And then starting in middle and high school, there starts to be more division in how the humanities and sciences are taught. At least in my experience, my history and language arts teachers assigned a lot of essays while my science teachers gave us a lot of worksheets and rote memorization exercises. I know this is a cliched question at this point, but HFtLR is such a beautiful blend of memoir and science writing– I’m really interested in what you feel the humanities can offer science and vice versa?
S: Oh man, I never read Animorphs growing up because the covers—which are iconic—kind of scared me, starfish girl and bumblebee boy especially. But I know so many people who speak so highly of these books…I really should just read them now!
And not a cliched question! You’re so right that elementary school often does a much better job integrating science and the humanities than middle and high schools. In elementary school, like half my grade, I wanted to be a marine biologist when I grew up. But I struggled with math and science later on, and felt like that was a referendum on my future. In college, when I imagined a dream future as a writer, I imagined myself writing about books or TV, always squarely in the humanities. But so many of my favorite essays wove in some element of science, such as Jo Ann Beard’s “The Fourth State of Matter” and Leslie Jamison’s “52 Blue.” When I was trying to pick a thesis topic I tried to write about topics that felt serious and worthy of a thesis—thank god I did not end up pursuing my first idea, which was war photography—I would inevitably find myself writing about an animal on the margins of those ideas. When I finally accepted I wanted to write about animals and that was okay, I realized I knew very little about them. So I taught myself how to research, first by reading popular science and history books, then reading the primary sources and papers they cited in the footnotes, then speaking to actual experts. And as I began writing essays about myself and science, I had a moment of realization where I was like, I just spent two hours trying to understand what color this octopus was when it was alive, and then I wrote a memory I had from middle school that I only half-remembered. Why am I not applying this rigor to writing my own life?
Both science and the humanities can work to imagine a better world, and neither exists in a vacuum. For people who are practicing science, writing and art can transport their ideas outside of the often erudite, paywalled places science is published and reach the public. Many people don’t read science books because they don’t feel like science books were written for them. The theoretical astrophysicist and writer Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein has blazed a trail for this kind of expansive, inclusive science storytelling that helps people locate themselves in the universe and understand it as a queer thing. Her writing, especially in her book The Disordered Cosmos, opened up a portal for me to caring about dark matter—something that I had long ago dismissed ever thinking about because it seemed far too confusing!
And science, and research more broadly, can teach writers and artists to be better interrogators of the narratives we encounter and build for ourselves. Science is all about questioning everything, and I wish this baseline of interrogation were more present in so much of the writing I read, from newspapers to memoir. Journalists should be questioning narratives they receive from, say, the police or the IDF, because power and titles do not make trustworthy sources. And my favorite memoirs are not tell-alls but rigorous interrogations of the writer’s past. I think this is why a book like Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, which is so raw in its vulnerability and genuine grappling with how when the world is cruel to you, you can be cruel to others and yourself, reaches a kind of transcendence I am always chasing in my own work.
(Do you still have a copy of Manatees? lol I would love to see it)
M: Sadly, Manatees is lost to the sands of time. I do, however, have all my animal binders from 4th grade–here’s a short video of one that I took a few years ago. They are massive.
Thank you so much for the reading recommendations! And all your insights!! I’m genuinely so curious about nature and animals but I also failed chemistry in high school (don’t worry I retook it ONLINE), so I’m very dependent on writers like you to braid the essays for me, or put some art cheese around the science pill, so to speak. My final question for you is: was there a particular sea creature you considered writing about, but ultimately did not?
S: Frogs verses Toads verses Frogs and Toads! Incredible!
And yes, there were many, but the one closest to my heart is the nudibranch, which is a kind of sea slug. They’re these stunning, kaleidoscopic, often miniscule little slugs, some of whom can steal stinging cells from their prey and store them in their body as a defense mechanism. (If you were a millennial on tumblr, you might have seen Bowiebranchia, which made an elaborate, archival case that David Bowie dressed like the sea slugs.) I loved nudibranchs so much, and when I had a second job writing clickbait for this ocean nonprofit—real headlines included “Meet Sealonardo DiCaprio, Oscar Winner & Rescued Seal” and “There's a Gay Dolphin Party in Australia”—I wrote this blog arguing that this one nudibranch, Janolus fuscus, looked just like Guy Fieri, because they both had frosted tips. Tell me if I’m wrong!!
Anyway, my original book proposal included a whole pitch for this Guy Fieri sea slug essay that was supposed to be about why it’s shitty that so many critics were unfairly cruel and classist to Guy Fieri when it seemed he was just a nice guy who raised money and would not stop officiating gay weddings, and how this time of juggling an $10/hour internship with my $50 per post second job while living in NYC meant I ate a lot of beautiful and greasy fast food, so that ultimately I could make some strained connection to how frosted tips could be a shield against haters and other, bigger slugs that might want to eat you. But, perhaps unsurprisingly, when I tried to write this essay, I realized you cannot honestly spin 5,000 words out of a passing resemblance a slug bears to the Mayor of Flavortown. But there is a curséd ~5,000 word draft of this essay languishing somewhere in my googledocs, where it will never see the light of day <3
M: Okay, we need to set up your Guy Fieri slug essay with the essay I kept trying to write in 2021 about 90 Day Fiancé, sex work, and, uhhhhhh….America? Thousands and thousands of words and I promise it never got more specific than that, but they should totally date. Thank you so much for talking to me, Sabrina. I loved every moment!!
S: Oh my god a 90 Day Fiancé essay! It’s a match made in (reality TV) heaven! Thank you so much for having me on, Maddy, it’s been an absolute delight! 🌖
How Far the Light Reaches is available wherever books are sold or from your local library. Trust me when I say that this book would make an incredible holiday gift for the outdoorsy gays in your life, or even those who merely enjoy the look of the outdoors through a window. You can read an excerpt here.
Fuck yeah, Sabrina Imbler! Good pull, Maddy!!! Wonderful interview as always, and a very enjoyable addition to what was a very enjoyable book!
These author interviews are all so! Good! Will def be checking out this book :)