Q&A With: Sabrina Imbler — The Magic Word

Feb 7

Feb 7 Q&A With: Sabrina Imbler

Bookseller Bex sat down with Sabrina Imbler, author of How Far the Light Reaches, and Dyke (geology) to talk eels, past selves, and how nature can reflect your own identity.

Bex

Today we're talking to Sabrina Imbler. I'm so excited. They are the author of How Far the Light Reaches and Dyke (geology), which have both been on our Staff Picks shelf for the last year. Their essays and reporting have appeared in various publications, including Defector Media, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Catapult, and Sierra among others. They are a writer and science journalist living in Brooklyn. Sabrina, hello!

Sabrina

Hi, Bex, thank you for having me and thank you for putting my books on the shelf. I feel like Kristina's blurb for How Far the Light Reaches is like the best blurb that I could ever ask for, which is a meme.

Bex

It's iconic. It is absolutely the best. We will have to post that when we post this because everyone deserves to see it. *Meme is below!*

So my first question is nice and easy. What are you reading right now?

Sabrina

I just finished Hua Shu's Stay True, loved it. It was a book that as soon as it came out I was like “I know I need to read this”. My mom is from Taiwan and also went to Berkeley so I just felt like there would be so many stories in common with Hua's story that my mom has shared with me. Then it won the freaking Pulitzer and so I borrowed a copy from a friend and I really loved it. An unexpected read. I also just recently finished Harry Dodges’ My Meteorite, which was a book that I also really loved. I had no idea what My Meteorite was about except that it was by Maggie Nelson's partner, and I had just watched, like, By Hook or by Crook, Harry Dodges' film with Silas Howard that's like a trans-masculine-buddy-road-trip comedy that also was kind of dark. I feel like the trailers really framed it as a comedy, and then I left it feeling quite sad.

Both Stay True and My Meteorite were a lot about grief and dealing with the loss of loved ones. My grandma passed in the Spring and I guess I haven't intentionally sought out books about grief but it was really lovely to receive both of these books and read them close together because they were just really interesting explorations of “how do you sit with grief? How does it percolate? How is it totally non-linear?” Yeah, I loved those books.

Bex

I really love Stay True, I also read that recently. There's obviously so much about his experience in college, just talking so much about that age without having any judgment towards it. I feel like when I think about myself in college and even just younger than that I'm like “oh my god how embarrassing was I?” So much cringe. Then I was like “well there's so much grace for a younger self that I really long to have but I don't know how”. I'm curious about grace for younger selves.

Sabrina

That's something that I was thinking about, too, and I think maybe because Hua's like a little bit older and has more space from his college self. I also totally was thinking “wow the college self that Hua's writing about is so annoying”. It’s sort of reaching towards pretension and trying to define yourself by remembering the way he was that he’s writing about. Like, defining yourself against the culture that is mainstream, against the things that everyone else likes because then a personality forms that is so alternative and cool. I obviously also did that in middle school, high school, and college. I know in my writing, and what I talk about in therapy, is I am repulsed oftentimes or embarrassed or just ashamed of my younger selves. I totally appreciated the way that he was able to just sort of put forward this person that I feel like so many of us have been. To not really be like “oh I don’t like this guy! I don't want to be around him!” but just kind of be like “this is exactly who I was without judgment”. I'm not there yet but, I really admired it.

Bex

I know you've talked a lot – and I know it's in How Far the Light Reaches as well – talking about labels and growing up and coming to your queerness. I remember you mentioned that Dan Lavery tweet that I have also referenced in my life of like, “Oh yeah, I'll think about testosterone every day, but I'm not trans”. And I'm like, “Oh yeah, I'll think about top surgery all the time, but clearly it's not for me.” And then eventually, you know, clearly you came out, started using different pronouns. And you've also written a lot about the trans community. And something I thought was so interesting about your Gender Reveal episode is you said, like, you're not really interested in labels anymore. And I know that's like also in How Far the Light Reaches, but also you're a wordsmith, you're a writer. And so words are like, that's what we barter in. And I'm wondering how you found that this resistance towards labels and as well as the growth of coming into queerness and transness has impacted your writing?

Sabrina

Hmm… That's such a huge question!

Bex

I know! That was gonna be my last question and then I was like “well, it fits in here!”

Sabrina

I mean I feel like I have like five different answers, but I think about the words and the labels. I think similarly to you! When I was first considering being trans or identifying with the trans community I really didn't give myself any kind of permission to see myself in that. I think I understood transness as something that you know since you were a kid, and that was not my experience. I think I felt huge amounts of very unhealthy emotions when I would see people on similar gender journeys as me who were, you know, cis for a long time and then were they/them or were she/they or started testosterone. I think I felt very confused and angry when I would see these comings-out because I would say, “well, if this person can do it, like, I could, but I can't do it. So, like, how could they be doing it?” And I was, yeah, big Gender Police. Which, like, kill the Gender Cop in your head!

I think part of that was, like, just being on the internet and encountering a lot of trans writing and trans people on the Internet, I feel like I saw a lot of the Twitter of like, “well lesbians are this” and “dykes are this” and “to be a trans masc you need to be this”. I was deeply trying to slot myself into this sort of taxonomy of transness and queerness and just being a human. Identity is really messy and complicated. It's easy to sort of shift your alignment in the city that you're in, or the age that you're in. I think about being a science writer and how I see and write about taxonomy as it exists in the biological kingdom and how for some people it's really cool to know if something is an arthropod or a crustacean or you know. I think a lot about pill bugs. The little roly-polys that you see in the garden are not bugs but they are crustaceans, closely related to lobsters and crabs. I feel like someone else would be like, “that's so cool!” and I'm like, “I don't know, I encounter it as a bug”, like that's how it is for me. I think I never really got the obsession towards classification in taxonomy. I think putting a word on something doesn’t necessarily change the way that I had always known it, which is something that lives in my garden.

I think I had a similar sort of discomfort with trying to find the right label knowing that as soon as I committed to one when there would be another one invented, like, five years from now that would take precedence. This morning I went to Aperture to get my pre-surgical clearance because I'm getting top surgery, which I'm so excited about but also so scared about.

Bex

Congratulations!

Sabrina

Thank you. I had my little blood drawn.

Bex

Oh my god. Wait, just also sorry to interrupt. I'm getting it, too!

Sabrina

Oh my God! Okay. Amazing. I like to play this weird game with my partner where I'm like, “would you trust this person as your top surgeon?” And they would be like, “this person is a Survivor contestant”.

Bex

Oh yeah, Mike White could absolutely be my top surgeon, you know?

Sabrina

It's interesting to write a memoir where one of the essays is about gender and you're like, “well, this is where I'm at right now”, and then as soon as you send the memoir to copy-edits you're like, “I kind of feel differently”. Then it comes out and you're like, “I feel a lot different”. Then you start testosterone and then you're like, “okay, well!” I'm happy with the way that I wrote my gender essay about cuttlefish. It was very much aware of the fact that it would immediately become dated and become like an imprint of the past, but it's also just been interesting to write a memoir. You have to come to so many truths and really grapple with things that you feel like you don't deserve or, like, you don't need. It requires a lot of emotional work and I feel like I look back at the person who wrote the memoir and it's like “you still weren't giving yourself everything that you wanted or everything that you needed”. I’ve also thought about top surgery since 2016 a lot and back then I was like, “I think I just want top surgery so that people accept me as a they/them”, and I should not feel that way!

But also –not to undermine my entire answer– but I do really like certain terms. I still feel very aligned with the term “genderqueer” because I like that it really implies that the gender I have is queer, whatever it is, wherever on the spectrum it lands. I do still check “non-binary” on my annual work diversity survey. I see myself as the one respondent. I feel like there are labels that I use in forms, or labels I use in parlance, with my friends. There's labels I use to my parents to be like just be very clear. It really varies.

Bex

I love that because I was also thinking a lot about– especially in terms of writing towards the trans community –and taking a while to accept what we want, realizing that sense of imposter syndrome, almost. I'm wondering, has writing– especially writing so much about creatures specifically –and doing so much science writing, if that has helped you with your own acceptance?

Sabrina

That's a fun question. In terms of feeling like an imposter in various spaces, whether it had to do with my queerness or my transness, I think it has been really helpful just to follow trans writers that I admire on social media like Davey Davis or like Tori Peters or Heron Walker or P.E. Moskowitz. I think hearing the way that they would constantly just talk about, “you should just get surgeries”, like, I feel like that is one of like Tuck's motto in Gender Reveal, is just like you can do something just because you want to or just because you think it'd be fun. Like I am stupidly on like “r/slash top surgery” and there is this question where someone was like “could I ask my doctor to put a third nipple in the middle of my chest?” and, you know, if I had been on reddit like a year ago I've been like “how foolish” and instead I was like “do it!” Like, I don’t know!

What a beautiful thing to be able to edit your body. Why not strive towards something that is, like, strange or fulfilling or exciting? I now let myself be like “I don't need a larger reason to get top surgery beyond the fact that I think I would look hot”. I also think it's allowed me more grace when I think about other people, even cis people, who get gender affirming surgeries. Everyone should be able to do what they wish with their body as long as it is not harming someone else.

To go back to your real question about creatures, I think that I spent a lot of my life not thinking a lot about my body, or not wanting to be in my body and not really relating necessarily to the people around me. I think creatures were a really obvious place to go where it's like, “I'm never gonna feel at home among frogs necessarily”, but there always will be this distance and this strangeness. So it's never a question of “how do I bridge that?” or “how do I cross that?” to come to a deeper understanding of what it’s like to be a jellyfish or the experience of an octopus. I think it allows– I mean journalism, right? –you're supposed to be outside of the story and while there are different ways of doing that, and different notions of objectivity, I think it was much easier just to be like, “I'm just writing about the frog and like I'm not sort of letting myself seep in”. Once I realized that I'm always seeping into everything that I encounter and the creatures that I learn about, then it was a project of “how do I find meaning in these little glimmers of reflections, or my little tendrils that I see when I write about this creature?”

I also think– and this is the most basic answer in the world –creatures are doing things that are so incredible and I deeply envy them. Like, it's so cool to be able to molt your entire exoskeleton and go from something that looks like a slug into something that has these beautiful feathery wings. I think while there's no direct comparison, like, I’m not interested in creature stories that are like “this jellyfish can heal its tentacle and so we will use that to heal a hand!” It's like, if we could do that, that's amazing but that's less exciting to me than the idea of “what is my equivalent of regrowing a tentacle, or molting an exoskeleton?” I think just the truly non-human splendor of the way that creatures, or non-human life, live really inspires grander possibilities for your own. So they definitely have been inspirational. I also just feel like there's a huge amount of the trans community that's like very into bugs and frogs, so.

Bex

Yeah, my original first question was just: “The ocean, trans?”

Sabrina

Ha ha! Yes.

Bex

The queer community: we love bugs, we love animals, we love birds, we love creatures. I was so excited, I had heard recently about eels in the Bermuda Triangle. The ocean is just so unknowable. There's so much we don't know about the ocean. We know less about the ocean than we know about space (which is something I heard once and never verified but it feels correct). The fact that the eels have just been roaming back to the Bermuda Triangle this entire time! When I heard that, part of me was like “that's so cool” and also was like “do I deserve to know that? Is that for me to know?” Do you have any fun thoughts about eels in the Bermuda Triangle?

Sabrina

Eels are amazing! I think no matter how much I report on creatures and their biology and the things that we learn about it, I will never not be astounded by the sheer vastness of animal migration. Just how it is just imprinted in their bodies to know where to go and to travel in these huge slithering masses. Baby eels look like they're almost entirely transparent. They just look like little like ribbons of glass that are just wiggling around. It's so wild to see this little, almost entirely translucent creature that truly is more water than body, just wriggling around. I'm just in awe of eels.

I also really do feel similarly oftentimes, like when I am reporting on science or reading about a specific creature and there's sort of a question of like, “how do they manage to do this? How do these crabs manage to colonize different heated oases on the deep sea floor when there's just miles and miles of absolutely freezing water that would stop their heart?” I both want to know, but I'm also like, “yeah, if that's the crab secret, like, I respect that!” Let them have their privacy!

There's this wonderful journalist, Rose Eveleth, who wrote this great story in Wired couple of years ago that was about animals' right to privacy in response to so many new efforts to use AI to track different animals like bears, and there are all these papers coming out being like “we train this AI on bear faces!” and the photos would just be a grid of bears spotted eating salmon or foraging for berries. It's cool– I know that it helps conservation to be able to know which bear is where, but also I'm like “these bears are being surveilled and they have no concept of what that means!” There's a lot of discomfort that I sometimes feel when it comes to really getting into animals’ business.

Bex

Something I'm really interested in also talking about is how the first essay on How Far the Light Reaches is about goldfish. I had heard the idea before of comparing non-native species and weeds with revolutionaries, where “invasive species” are marginalized communities and mainstream society wants to eradicate them. . I read up on that and I was like “okay, yes I agree with this”, but also a metaphor can only take us so far. At the end of the day, the spotted lanternfly: not great, doing a lot of bad things, but also it's here. It's our fault, what are we gonna do? Then I read the goldfish piece, and the way you were comparing the idea of being a goldfish and taking up space this way, and using that as a space of resistance, I feel like I aligned so much more with the idea of that than with the idea of discussing weeds for some reason.I don’t like the term invasive species, it almost feels rude– but I'm curious about if you can speak a little more on this concept of being a goldfish and the goldfish being left in these ponds taking over the space. Because on one hand they’re choking out certain habitats and on the other hand it's “well they're there and they're growing and they're living their lives.” What would it be like if we grew and lived our lives and we started taking up space, too?

Sabrina

That's a beautiful question. I hadn't read about weeds and other invasive non-native species as, I guess, representative of queer resistances, but I should be much better about reading queer ecology than I am. That is super interesting. There are so many debates in science about “what do we call creatures that are not native to an area?” “How long do they have to be here before they're considered endemic?”

There are so many species that we don't even necessarily know if they weren't here because they've been here for hundreds of years and the new equilibrium includes them. I'll never not feel bad reading about an “alien bug”. It's like, this bug is not an alien! It's from China, but now it's here! It's still a citizen of Earth!

I guess I first encountered the feral goldfish when I was reading a New York Times article by this journalist who is now a fishmonger, I think: Fannie Yin. They wrote about just the phenomenon of these goldfish released from a domestic pet store. There were goldfish that ballooned over a couple of generations and the photo was a classic fisherman holding a milk-jug-sized goldfish. I was just stunned. It's funny because I had spent a lot of time thinking about goldfish. The first essay, the goldfish essay, was originally one that I wrote for college and it was called Sea No Evil. Spelled like the sea.

Bex

I wish it stayed like that!

Sabrina

Well, if anyone is enterprising, I also read it out loud as a TEDx talk and it is on YouTube and I don't know how to take it down. But the point of it was that my college did something that I think a lot of colleges do where they're like, “are you depressed? Here's a free goldfish, take care of it”. And I was like, “that's the worst thing you could possibly give a depressed college student”. Like, a creature that could die easily and will probably be depressing to look at, right? This little tiny, like, I think they were half gallon plastic containers you put your goldfish in and take into your dorm room.

I just wanted to do the simple act of communicating. I knew that goldfish were not supposed to be in bowls and I knew that they could get big, but I just thought that was the best idea. The best possible life for a goldfish would be living in a 20 gallon, 30 gallon tank. Then when I saw this New York Times story and I was just so stunned and taken aback. I felt confronted with my own biases that I had about this creature. I like to think I'm very open-minded and I feel like I'm always trying to learn as much as I can about the creatures that I encounter, but this was one that I had been thinking about for so many years of my life and I never even considered what it would be like in the wild.

It was just such a fantastical image. And as you were talking about it I had to sit with the discomfort knowing that the goldfish that was photographed in this New York Times article was euthanized. In a lot of these studies on “invasive” or “non-native species”, especially ones that are unwanted, there's often laws where if you catch it, you have to euthanize it. You have to kill them because they're not supposed to be there.

It was interesting to work through my recognition and my feeling of community with this creature that lived a life. It feels like those jokes about someone who was abducted by aliens and then they come back and they're like, “you'll never believe what I saw!” And it's like, can you imagine if any of these pet store goldfish saw this gallon-big goldfish? Like, what would they even think? Would they recognize it as another goldfish? I don't even know what a goldfish experience of another goldfish is, but to feel so inspired and in awe of this creature is to also know that there’s a world where ponds everywhere are just riddled with big goldfish. To know is to know it’s not good and would endanger the livelihood of the native fish and shellfish that lived there would just be obliterated by their presence. I think that's something that comes up in every story that I write about creatures and conservation in some way, the discomfort of a lot of the things that I learn about in nature.

There is a sort of valence of dread or ugliness of ecological problems. It's been interesting to see New Yorkers’ response to spotted lanternflies because it's probably one of the most visible forms of “invasive species”. We have been ordered to kill them by the government. You know, you see a lot of sparrows and you're like “okay those are invasive but no one is telling me to smash them with rocks, right?” It's tricky because I dutifully I go out, I smash them, I stomp on them and I also feel really sad doing it because I recognize that it's so much easier for us to kill bugs than it is for us to, you know, kill a bird or kill some kind of mammal. I feel like even people feel more discomfort around, like, rats maybe than spotted lanternflies. I was also thinking about this a lot near the end of the last spotted lanternfly season when all of the bugs were adults and they were all fluttering in these hoards around Lincoln Market. I was just going around the perimeter stomping on them. Mitski's song, Bug Like an Angel had just come out and I was listening to it on loop and crying because I was like “none of these bugs deserve to die in the same way that none of these goldfish deserve to die”. They didn't ask to come here, they simply stowed away conveniently like on a ship or whatever. However they got here. A plane?

I know that it’s for the ecological good that I kill them and that I prevent them from laying their eggs and decimating the native trees and upsetting these communities, but there is just this grief of having to deal with this creature that I have identified with. I will always feel sad and I will always pour one out for the lantern flies that I smash. Pour one out for the lantern flies.

Bex

One of my favorite Halloween costumes I've ever seen is when a small child dressed as a lantern fly came into the store and we were like, “that's such a good costume”. And he was like, “it's the scariest thing I could think of”. It was so sweet.

While we're on the topic of lantern flies and also writing, you know, talking about the right to creature privacy while also helping conservationists, I would expect that with writing so much about creatures, there’s fear that that's attached because of how the world is going. I'm wondering where you find hope within writing about all these creatures.

Sabrina

That's such a good question and also one that I talk about in therapy a lot. I feel very privileged in the fact that I don't think I could be a climate reporter. I see my friends and other writers who are full-time climate reporters and I'm in awe of the grief and the urgency and the dread that they're able to communicate. That's obviously very present in a lot of the writing that I do, at least at work, but I always have the option to write about how this bug flings its pee in like little balls if I'm having a sad climate dread week. And there's less of a, yeah, like “this bug will die in ten years”.

But I think I also know that I obviously can't just write about these papers that are less touched by climate and I do want all of my work, even if it's not directly about climate change, to foster empathy for the immense numbers of species that are imperiled due to the climate crisis and deforestation and agricultural development and everything else that we're doing to wreak havoc on the natural world. I think I do get very sad all the time at work, but I think just talking to the scientists that I get to speak with they think about these things or they think about their species 24-7 and are so committed to recording them and recording their existence on Earth and getting people to care about them and see the wonder in them. I always leave these conversations, even if it's the most depressing paper in the world, feeling really hopeful because of the passion that they bring to their work and the willingness that they have with me or with other reporters about what they're working on.

This is also very basic, but I take huge amounts of comfort in my cats. They're not threatened in any way, and are also totally an unwanted “invasive species” in so many different areas, especially Australia and New Zealand. Talk about discomfort around getting rid of a non-native species! There's a lot of cat-bird debate, but I think it just reminds me how special it is that I get to build these deep, intimate relationships with non-human animals and how lucky I am to learn a little bit each day about how they perceive the world and to also know that I want to build those relationships with creatures that are not fuzzy and adorable and the prettiest girl and boy in the world.

So yeah, I think just being around animals also. Wild, domesticated. It also gives me a lot of hope.

Bex

That's so nice! Thank you so much for being here joining me in this interview. It was just a true pleasure chatting with you.

Is there anything you wanna plug, yours or otherwise?

Sabrina

I do! I think that everyone who is interested in animals should read Sy Montgomery's new book Of Time and Turtles, which made me cry so many times. Talk about finding hope in the most tragic circumstances! I had no idea how many turtles are just run over by cars every day. And the immense amount of labor that it takes to run a turtle rehabilitation center in, I believe, New Hampshire. And Sy, who obviously wrote Soul of an Octopus, a classic creature book. She basically volunteers with these two lesbian turtle rehabilitators in New Hampshire and learns about the miraculous ways that turtle bodies work; they really operate on much more slowed down scales of time. Their healing takes a lot longer, they can stop their heartbeat for long periods of time. I wept learning about the turtles that didn't make it and I wept learning about the turtles that did. I think it really reminded me that so much of my job is reading about creatures that live in far-flung places on my computer and talking to scientists on Zoom and it made me remember that one of some of the most impactful things you can do with your time is spending it with the animals that are local to you. Everyone should read Of Time and Turtles, I really loved it so much.

Bex

You know where they can get a copy? At Books Are Magic! Or your local library. We all, the whole bookstore, we're all big proponents of libraries. Definitely. Thank you so much for being here.

Sabrina

Of course!

Here’s that meme we were talking about! Shoutout to Kristina the Meme Queen!