Sabrina Imbler is the author of How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures and a staff writer at Defector, an employee-owned sports and culture website. Previously Sabrina worked as a reporting fellow on the science and health desk of The New York Times. They have received fellowships or scholarships from Tin House, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop and Jack Jones Literary Arts.

EB: How did you start writing nonfiction in general, and what specifically drew you to writing about animals?

SI: I did journalism in high school and college. My parents were very anxious about the possibility of me getting like a job and––now as an adult I realize––were rightfully suspicious of someone who wanted to be a writer. So, I figured that nonfiction and journalism were the most secure path forward to becoming a writer. When I was in college, I looked up to a lot of other students and recent graduates who were doing cultural criticism. It felt like the chic thing to do, and I really enjoyed reading it. But when I tried to write a couple of pieces about politics or culture, I realize that was extremely not my strong suit. I don’t think I am a very strong critic. I often have very personal reactions to things, and I don’t think I’m very good at assessing patterns necessarily.

EB: I can relate—often genres of writing I love to read (magical realism, sci-fi, poetry) are just completely out of my skill set to write.

SI: Then I was thinking about what to do for my senior thesis, which was a long nonfiction project. I had always loved the ocean and I really loved creatures. Like many other kids, I wanted to be a marine biologist before I realized that it involves a lot of math. So I decided I would write my senior thesis about whales, because it felt like a subject where there was so much to mine culturally, historically, in literature, etc. I had already done a couple of shorter nonfiction pieces in college that were about animals, but this was my sort of first big foray. It was fueling in many ways, and I found endless inspiration in the natural world. It felt like the closest I could come to encountering a lot of these creatures—like the extinct ones or the ones that you have to go out to the middle of the ocean to see.

But at the same time, I struggled with the format. I was trying to be very objective, whatever that meant, and not put myself in the narrative, but then halfway through I pivoted and decided to try inserting myself. Ultimately the thesis was a really bad piece of writing. But I think it was really helpful as my first foray into trying to write nonfiction that was about animals but also about me.

EB: What happened after the whale thesis? How did How Far the Light Reaches come about? Didn’t it begin as a column on Catapult?

SI: After college I decided that I wanted to be a science journalist, because it felt like an easy way to write about animals. It also enabled me to have a job with a salary, which felt much more attainable than writing a book. But I didn’t go to journalism school, and I didn’t really have any experience writing about science. So, my first real job after a series of internships was writing product reviews for Wirecutter, reviewing things like toasters and air conditioners. It was a really good job, but it was not what I wanted to be doing. I didn’t feel like I had enough experience to pitch freelance science stories yet. But I did read a lot of personal essays, and I began to think that this could be a way into writing about the ocean. I learned about the Catapult columns from reading Angela Chen’s series on data and the role data places in our lives and in culture. That was the first example that I’d seen of very accessible essays about science—you didn’t need to be a scientist to understand it. It was about taking a popular science concept and weaving it into a story about her life.

While writing product reviews, I had also taken on a freelance job writing content for an ocean nonprofit, where I would write stories that were like, “You’ll Never Guess Where This Seal Wound Up!” or “This Handicapped Goldfish got a New Lease on Life!” I was writing five of those stories a week and learning about so many different creatures in the ocean. Then I learned about this octopus that brooded her eggs for four-and-a-half years without eating. I really emotionally fixated on that octopus, for reasons that were not entirely clear to me at the time. But as I continued to think about this octopus, I realized that it made me think about my own experiences with disordered eating and my mother’s experiences with disordered eating, and that eventually became the first essay in the Catapult column. It was kind of easy to write––like I wrote it all on an Amtrak going to a New Year’s party—and I just tried to switch back and forth between the two stories, and I was really pleased with how it turned out.

After that, I tried to model the other essays on the octopus essay, and when I had done six pieces for Catapult, someone on Twitter asked, “What is this going to become?” I’d never thought about it. I’d imagined I’d write the column forever. But then I realized I could be more ambitious about the project, and I went to a Tin House workshop and did a writing retreat where I learned about how publishing works and how to sell a book, and I began to think: what would this look like as a book?

EB: I mean, I am obsessed with that back-and-forth memoir/research structure for personal essays. I really loved how each essay in your book explored a different animal and the way you could see parts of your own life through the lens of that species. The structure reminded me a lot of two other books I love: World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatathil [who was interviewed for the Fiction Advocate series Write Like a Mother] and How to Be a Good Creature by Sy Montgomery. But how did you decide what sea creatures to focus on? There are so many to choose from! Like why the cuttlefish and not a seal?

SI: That’s so funny. I love seals. They’re my favorite.

EB: [laughing] So why not seals?

SI: Early on, when I was brainstorming for the Catapult series, I made two columns: in one column, I listed a bunch of creatures that I thought were cool that I had learned about or encountered in some way. In the other column, I wrote a list of personal experiences and identities that I felt like I would have something to say about or that I’d want to write about. Then I looked at these two very different-seeming columns, and began to look for connections. I feel like now I’ve trained my brain to find metaphors like in the natural world, but, at the time, I would compare this creature and look at this experience and see if anything sparked between them. So that’s how I came up with some of the early essays in the book, too—like the sand striker one, which is about sexual assault. I remembered from watching Blue Planet how they depicted this worm like a predator, lurking in the shadows—and I thought it was an interesting way to think about looking for threats. And then I made the maybe obvious realization the sand striker is also called the bobbitt-worm, named for a survivor of sexual violence, and the more I wrote, the more connections were stirred up.

There were definitely creatures that didn’t make the cut, which I was bummed about. One of my favorite sea creatures are nudibranchs, toxic sea slugs, and I think they’re so cool. I’ve loved them for years and have tried to work them into several essays. I tried to write one about how they look like Guy Fieri, but I realized sit was not a 6,000-word essay. I was like, this is just a fun tweet.

EB: Oh, man, I would have totally read that essay because I love Guy Fieri, but I get it. It’s hard figuring out what can be a whole essay versus what is a tweet versus what is just a text to a friend.

SI: All worthy genres.

EB: I’m always a sucker for research, and clearly you did a lot for this book. How did you approach research for the science-y parts versus for the memoir parts?

SI: The most intensive personal research I did was for the chapter about my grandma and the Chinese sturgeon. I started interviewing my grandma over the phone, and then in person when I went home to visit my parents. It was a years-long process, and I’m glad I started early, because I didn’t have a lot of experience interviewing family members. At first, I treated her like I was a reporter, which was like weird, but as we had more and more conversations, they got more intimate and less about the objective truth and more about the interiority of my grandma’s experience. My fact checker went through the transcripts of those conversations, but in the end we were both fine with the fact that it’s an essay about one person’s memory of a deeply traumatic event. It is not super important that we know exactly what city she was in or how many people were with her. We are more interested in the emotional truth of this story.

I also talked with my mom for the octopus essay. I had spoken with her for the Catapult version, which is shorter, so I showed her the final draft of the book version, and then we chatted about what she wanted to include, what she didn’t feel comfortable including, and how in certain instances her memory diverged from my own. It was a good reminder that it is impossible to interview someone to find the concrete “objective” truth of a memory, even if we were the only two people there. It was clarifying to see the points where we diverged, and to realize maybe they were less crucial to the story than I had thought.

I also texted my friends—anyone who was included in any substantial part got to read the section that included them, and I asked do you feel comfortable with this? What am I getting wrong? I also did research in my digital archives, meaning Facebook.

EB: [laughing] My biggest regret as a personal essay researcher was deleting my Live Journal account in a fit of embarrassment in 2006.

Did your writing and research change your relationship to animals in any way, or was there something you were particularly surprised to learn about one of your animal subjects? Did you have any assumptions about any of the animals going into the writing that changed?

SI: That’s a great question. I think that happened with a lot of the essays—the goldfish one in particular comes to mind. I wrote a draft of it first in college, and it was just an essay about how you shouldn’t keep goldfish in bowls, how they need more space. But as I was revising it to fit in the format of the book, I began imagining using the goldfish’s experience in a bowl as a metaphor to talk about how lonely and uncomfortable I felt like in middle school. But I had trouble writing it, and my editor didn’t love it—it felt very sad teenage diary. Then I came across this New York Times article by Steph Yin about feral goldfish growing to the size of milk jugs in a lake in the Midwest, and I never imagined that goldfish could thrive like that. In the first version of the essay, I thought I was doing goldfish this great redemption by saying they don’t belong in bowls, they belong in a tank, and now I was thinking maybe they don’t even belong in a tank but in a pond—I mean, not ecologically speaking, but I realized I had limited my imagination of what they could become. I turned that lens on my own self and thought about my experiences beyond high school, and it broke open a new part of the horizon.

Same with the cuttlefish essay—I knew writing about gender presentation had to be paired with the cuttlefish, and there are all these narratives of cuttlefish in nature documentaries about their camouflage as a way of escaping predators, or how their mating rituals are like dressing up in drag. But so much of cuttlefish communication is just for other cuttlefish, and I was like so pleased to learn about this display called “splotch” that female cuttlefish use only with other female cuttlefish… I tried to keep myself open to surprise and I tried to reorient the stories towards the experience of cuttlefish as a cuttlefish and not what we consider to be most interesting about the cuttlefish.

EB: Besides trying to honor the experience of a cuttlefish as a cuttlefish, what do you think are some of the other challenges of writing about subjects you can’t interview directly?

SI: I get asked a lot about the dangers of anthropomorphism, and when I entered science journalism, I really feared it and worried I wouldn’t be a good journalist if I fell into that trap. But I feel like the community of science writers has really moved the needle on anthropomorphism and has now embraced it as a tool for forming connection, which I deeply believe that it is. I think about things like seeing like a mother whale grieving her calf, and recognizing that is a grief very similar to what we humans experience. But then I also see writing a story that’s comparing a cockroach to your ex-boyfriend, and how that is doing very different work. That form of anthropomorphism is not in service of the cockroach or understanding the cockroach’s experience; we’re using it only to think about ourselves, and I’m only learning about your ex-boyfriend, and not the cockroach. So I tried to be really careful in the comparisons that I made, and the metaphors that I drew. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t only using the animals as a lens into my own experience, but also about understanding the animals on their own terms. It was both a challenge and a tool.

I love the way you phrased it as “subjects you can’t interview”––it’s so true, but I also feel like when I interview people, you can’t always trust what they’re saying. An animal is not going to lie to you in a way that like a human source would.

EB: Fair.

SI: Also, a lot of this book is about creatures I would never be able to encounter—I can’t snorkel and see a yeti crab. So another challenge was trying to bring them to life, and it was always going to be kind of a fabulation. There’s only so much that I that I can like feel comfortable saying and know to be true.

EB: Why do you think it is important that humans read and write about non-humans?

SI: Something I often try to remind myself is that not everyone feels the way about animals that I do, especially not the ones who are not cute or cuddly. Whenever I write about a creature for my job or in this book, I strive to build a connection between person and an animal.

I feel really, really grateful when I meet an animal. My immediate reaction is curiosity and wonder, and I know that that isn’t true for everyone. A lot of people don’t care about animals or find them repulsive or uninteresting. We have a tendency to think of ourselves as separate from the many other species that occupy this earth, and to think that our goals and our struggles for survival are separate from theirs. And I really disagree with that. I think it is really important to remember that we all depend on functioning ecosystems and a stable climate. I see the importance of essays and stories and books about animals as reminding everyone of our immense shared stakes and connection and experiences.

I know this is a series about nonfiction but have you read What We Fed to the Manticore by Talia Lakshmi Kolluri?

EB: No. Adding it to my list now!

SI: It’s really good. It’s a short story collection narrated from the perspective of animals. Some people might be like, “You can’t narrate the story as a donkey!” and it’s like, whatever, it’s fiction. She’s not saying she is the donkey. I’m so interested in projects that cultivate empathy. Talia’s work is really cool.

EB: What about some nonfiction writers who write about animals? Who else do you admire?

SI: Ed Yong’s entire body of work, especially An Immense World. I also love Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals by Alexis Pauline Gumbs—it’s a very radical book that looks to animals as teachers. And I also really loved Voice of the Fish by Lars Horns, which is a book-length essay about the sea but also about the body and ability and queerness and transition.

EB: Finally, who are the non-humans in your life right now?

SI: That’s such a special question! I have two cats who I love so dearly. Their names are Melon and Sesame. Melon is one and Sesame is four, and they love to fight but I also think they respect each other. It was a huge learning experience to transition them together—I had never transitioned cats before and it was such an incredibly grueling six-month experience where my partner and I had to sleep in separate bedrooms—and by that, I mean our bedroom and the living room—and each room had a cat because they couldn’t live together yet. I learned a lot in terms of patience and moving at the speed the cats needed and not trying to push things, building trust and care in our mixed-species family.

I also have ember tetras in a fish tank. They’re behind me right now. They have lived through a lot it’s really hard to keep a fish tank in New York—I have lost lots of fish—but they are very sturdy and beautiful and they love to eat.

I’m also trying to be like more present and appreciative of the bugs in my life. I’ve been trying to desensitize myself to house centipedes and because I’ve always found them really gross with their lots of little legs, but I had known for a while but they actually don’t mean me any harm. And I was like, what does it take to try to unlearn the disgust reaction that I have towards this creature that will probably live in every apartment that I ever live in? How can I not feel the urge to kill or remove this thing but just coexist with it?