The Last Word On Nothing

This is Part II of my heart-filling conversation with Sabrina Imbler (they/them), a poet, essayist, science writer, and author of the forthcoming collection HOW FAR THE LIGHT REACHES: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures. If you missed Part I last month, you can read it here.

Kate: What was the fact-checking process like for this book? Did you have to hire a fact-checker? And did they restrict their fact-checking to the scientific portions of the book, or did they check your personal stories, too?

Sabrina: I am so happy when people talk openly about fact-checking in publishing, because it is truly so wild that like nothing is fact-checked.

Sabrina: I knew from the beginning that I needed to have a fact-checker, both because it’s the right thing to do and because I am constantly making tiny mistakes and I cannot catch them on my own. I always assumed I would have to pay for my own fact-checker, because my publisher would have no in-house resources. And even if they did, I would have wanted to hire my own because scientific fact-checking is so specific.

Kate: Right.

Sabrina: I connected with this journalist and poet named Hannah Seo who also does fact-checking. She’s incredible. I sent Hannah essays throughout the process, after I and my book editor Jean had gone back and forth several times and we felt confident that it was not going to change. I’d send [Hannah] all of my papers and news stories I looked at. For personal stories, there’s one chapter that involves my grandma, so I sent all of my transcripts, recordings, and notes from my conversations with my grandma. Then I’d go through and incorporate changes. For every single essay, we had at least one more round once the copy editor went through.  

I was very grateful to get a grant to cover all the fact-checking from the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, which was really incredible. And I’m really grateful to have worked with Hannah. It was so nice to have her expertise as a poet and a writer as well as a fact-checker. There were so many moments where the fact wasn’t wrong, but we needed to be more precise. She was very understanding of the literary aims of the book and open to moments of fabulation. We were both on the same page, like, let’s check in with each other if we feel like this is going too far into speculation or misrepresenting something. It was a constant conversation.

She’s also just the kindest person. And she has such a beautiful laugh. I think it’s my favorite laugh I’ve ever heard. It sounds like bells.

Kate: Oh, this is warming my heart. So (this is my favorite question): Descriptions of animal behavior so often rely on a ridiculously simplified sex binary. Like “males do this, and females do that.” How do you reconcile these reductive explanations with your own experience of gender and everything you know as a science writer about so-called biological sex?

Sabrina: I was definitely having gender feelings as I was writing the cuttlefish essay. I kept encountering these very reductive explanations of cuttlefish mating, told through this very anthropomorphic lens. I am a huge supporter of empathetic anthropomorphism, recognizing connections that make us feel seen or help us understand the animal. But people were describing the cuttlefish that would don the coloration of the opposite sex, and they would say the cuttlefish was “in drag,” or call it “devious,” ascribing harmful human feelings about human differences to the cuttlefish. I found that really frustrating.

The natural world teems with so many different imaginings of sex, whether that’s biological sex or ways to reproduce. And there are so many easy parallels. I think about the humphead wrasse, which are all born a certain sex. And there’s one dominant male, and if that dominant male leaves or is killed, then the biggest female will change sex to become the dominant male. And so people are like, “The fish is trans!” No. The fish isn’t trans. The fish is doing what the fish does.

Our understanding of being transgender is very specific to our own experience as a species. I tried to understand the limits of the metaphor and not equate one thing to another, and I tried to celebrate all of these different ways of having a body and being with another body that exists in the ocean.

Kate: On the subject of change: truth and fact are complicated and living things. It’s been a decent amount of time since you wrote the last word of the book. Have any of the thoughts or feelings or relationships you describe in the book changed since then? What about the science?

Sabrina: Absolutely. When I was narrating the audiobook, I was checking how to pronounce all these species names. I emailed a researcher to say, “Hey, can you tell me how to pronounce Neonathophausia ingens?” I hadn’t realized that the source I was looking at was using Neonathophausia, but the species was now just instantiated as Nathophausia ingens. [The researcher] was able to say, “It’s not that, it’s this, and this is how you say it.” So I was able to make that tweak.

I was talking with my friend Emily, who has written several books on new things happening in science. And there’s just this understanding that a book will immediately become outdated and be a record of what was thought to be true at that time. I imagine there will be lots of little facts that change over time. But I’m at peace with the idea that I can’t predict how these things change.  

A lot of the first essays in the book I wrote early on, and they reflected things I was thinking about very deeply back then, and now I don’t think about as much, and I have different opinions. Maybe that’s just something weird about essay collections, right? Some of them will be older, some of them will be newer, and I don’t believe the right thing to do once I detect a shift in my opinion is to be like, “Well, now I have to rewrite the essay.”

I was really anxious about the cuttlefish essay because I was like, “I have to figure out my gender before I finish this essay. Because what if I say a gender that isn’t how I feel later?” It was a huge and constant source of anxiety. I kept putting it off because I felt like I had to feel settled in my understanding of myself. And of course as soon as I wrote the essay, I was like…just kidding. I’m different now. I started testosterone after the final, final copy of the book. If I were to write the cuttlefish essay now, of course I would talk about testosterone.

It was very freeing to learn about pseudomorphs—the ink figures that cuttlefish can eject from their bodies that resemble them in that moment. And then they dissipate, because it’s a cloud of ink. I found that to be a really powerful metaphor for whatever essay I’m writing. Maybe my understanding will shift, but that doesn’t make the truth of what I wrote any less true for that version of myself. This is an imprint and an accurate rendering of a past self. I can hold tenderness toward it and be proud of it, but still know that there is going to be this gap between the self that rendered the essay and the self I am now. I am at peace with the gap.

Kate: Oh, that was so beautiful. I got teary while you were talking. I needed to hear that.

Sabrina: I hope it’s freeing.

Kate: It really is. So I know that the blurbing portion of the publishing process is over, but if you could have anybody, living or dead, blurb your book, who would it be?

Sabrina: I thought it was iconic when Merlin Sheldrake, who wrote An Entangled Life, seeded his book with spores and let mushrooms grow from them and then ate the mushrooms. That is amazing. What a fun and silly, but deeply real way of letting the subject of your book engage with it in the way that is most meaningful to them. So I guess I’d like some wood-eating worms to eat my book. That would be the ultimate blurb.

Kate: That’s awesome. Final question: Who is your ideal reader for this book, and what do you hope they take away from it?

Sabrina: My deepest hope is that this book reaches people who are still figuring themselves out, which I think is probably everyone. And also people who are hoping to deepen their relationship with the natural world. I hope that the people who find this book can consider creatures, plants, and fungi that live around them in new lights, and try to find connection across difference.

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Image credit: Unsplash