For science journalist Sabrina Imbler, sea creatures always came first.
“All animal life is deeply inflected by my personal and subjective experience of the world,” Imbler said. “I was trying to write all of these stories that were just about the animals, but I found that sometimes I would just have very personal connections to creatures that I had never met.”
When Imbler learned about a deep sea octopus off the coast of California that brooded her eggs for four and a half years — without eating — it sparked something in them.
“She reminded me of so much of my own personal experience, like my history of disordered eating, my relationship with my mother, my limited understanding of sacrifices she made for me to have a better life,” said Imbler.
Using this octopus as inspiration, Imbler wrote this week’s Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle selection, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures.
“This octopus helped me understand all these things about myself, so that was the first essay that would spark the seed of the book,” they said. “I found that looking at animals that way really helped me understand them more, and also often helped me understand parts of my life that I sort of hadn’t had time to work through.”
How Far the Light Reaches — which Imbler will be reading from and discussing at 3:30 p.m. today in the Hall of Philosophy — is an autobiographical essay collection that draws parallels between Imbler’s own life as a queer, mixed-race writer, and sea creatures living in remote environments.
Imbler has always felt connected to sea creatures, and relied on anthropomorphism and the use of metaphors as a way to make these connections with the creatures while writing How Far the Light Reaches. When writing the book, Imbler began braiding stories about sea creatures with those of their own life, keeping the stories separate but parallel.
During their research, Imbler began learning about deep sea crabs that gather together and “dance” by waving their claws back and forth by hydrothermal vents to gain energy. The connections Imbler began to see with their own human interactions inspired the chapter in the book centered around the crabs.
“I was looking at all these images of these crabs clustered together, and they looked like they were almost like out dancing at a night out,” Imbler said. “It’s the deep sea, but everything’s really dark, and they’re all piled up on top of each other in these hot areas. That’s just like nightlife to me. (The essay uses) crabs as a metaphor for these oases of queer nightlife that I found when I moved to a new city that felt very strange and familiar.”
Imbler is the author of chapbook Dyke (geology), which was published by Black Lawrence Press and selected for the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Program. How Far the Light Reaches is Imbler’s first full-length book, and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in science and technology. Imbler is a staff writer at the worker-owned site Defector, where they cover all types of creatures and the natural world. They consider Defector a place where they are able to keep thinking through how we find connection with animals and shining a spotlight on lesser-loved, or uncharismatic, species.
Because of their personal experiences with gender and sexuality, Imbler wanted to focus on animals that had been maligned or marginalized by those who were studying them and writing about them.
“I was really interested in pointing out the ways in which we tried to slot animals into our own human narratives, sometimes for good, sometimes for bad, sometimes to the detriment of certain marginalized groups,” Imbler said. “These are just biological adaptations that the animals have that are so separate from and disinterested in our own human conceptions of gender and sexuality — this is just normal for the animals.”
Despite growing up in the socially liberal Bay Area of California, Imbler still felt influenced by “compulsory heterosexuality” and prescribed gender roles. They didn’t have many queer people to look up to when growing up, and they said that made their process of finding a sense of self difficult.
“I didn’t see the model of myself that I wanted to be,” they said.
So they read.
“Reading more of these stories and hearing about people who had more complicated journeys to coming out, who didn’t always know that they were queer, I think that gave me a lot of permission to look inward and think, ‘Well, what do I want to be like? Who do I think I am?’ ” Imbler said. “I felt like, if I don’t have any qualms about sharing these personal stories to the world, maybe it’ll help someone else take another step in that journey, or help them see themselves.”
During their author presentation today, Imbler will be discussing the deep sea creatures they highlight in the book with hopes to inspire a deeper appreciation for the ocean and our connection to it.
“The deep sea is facing a really huge environmental threat right now with deep sea mining and the search for cobalt and other minerals,” said Imbler. “People think about the deep sea as this barren place with spooky, scary life forms, and I am hoping that my talk can help people sort of recognize that we have more in common with these strange creatures of the deep. … There is so much left to learn and appreciate about the world that they live in.”
