Writer and science journalist Sabrina Imbler on not waiting to release your best work

What are you working on right now?

I’m thinking of it as my Bug Book. I’m using “bug” in the colloquial sense—anything small, slithering, creepy, crawly. I’m hoping to write about moths, horseshoe crabs, crickets, leeches, and these self-decapitating slugs that can regrow their bodies. It’s refreshing to work on a book without any vertebrates, so far. Vertebrate privilege is big in animal journalism.

You’ve carved out a niche covering lesser-known, lesser-loved animals. Why are you drawn to the creature beat?

There are so many animals that people see as bizarre, less-than, or uncharismatic, and those animals often have the weirdest life cycles and survival adaptations. I think that tension makes for a great story. In science journalism, a common strategy to build empathy with animals is to say, “this creature is the same as humans” and to stress our points of connection. But I’m really interested in the differences, and the ways we are strange to each other, because that’s just a reality for many, many species. And I think that can also build connection and empathy and wonder, just in a different way.

Wonder feels central to your memoir*, *How Far the Light Reaches, in which you write about marine life with such reverence. Has your experience of wonder evolved over time?

The idea of wonder can be very superlative, right? It’s the oldest, the rarest. It always has some kind of lore, something that makes it distinct. As a journalist, I was raised to see wonder as something objectively beautiful, objectively fascinating—like watching a chameleon change colors. That spirit of wonder drove so much of my first book, but as I’ve spent more time with the creatures that actually live around me, I’ve learned that wonder can also be accompanied by fear or disgust.

Toward the creatures themselves.

Yeah. I grew up, like many people, afraid of insects and grossed out by them all. Recently, though, I’ve become invested in building connections with creatures that make me uncomfortable or squeamish. I’ve been spending time with the centipedes in my house, trying to unlearn my bias. It’s a practice that involves a lot of wonder, but it feels different from the wonder that animated How Far the Light Reaches.

What makes it feel different?

There was only so much I could discover about the animals I knew I loved. Everything I learned about a whale or a goldfish would fit into my narrative: “Isn’t this remarkable? Isn’t this otherworldly?” Now, the things I’m learning are wondrous in a different way. I’m like, “I’m glad I watched a video of this. I don’t want to actually come close to it.” Working through these more complicated feelings—wonder that comes from strangeness, difference, and disgust—has helped me interrogate my biases. It’s also stretched my empathy to places where I feel uncomfortable. I think that’s an important human practice: to constantly try to expand your empathy.

Each essay in How Far the Light Reaches pairs a sea creature with your personal experience. I’m struck by your choice to blend personal narrative and science writing—two genres that, at first glance, might seem at odds.

I was really scared that people would think, these things don’t belong together. Like, how can you talk about this worm and also your experience with sexual assault? I wrote a lot of my first book afraid that people would make that argument, and then no one actually did. Now that I’m not trying to convince some made-up person that these things belong together, I can focus on making work that feels exciting and new to me, and that’s also saying something.

What do you mean by that?

I mean, it’s obviously a really wild time to be a creative person and to have some kind of platform, especially when people like Sally Rooney or Viet Thanh Nguyen are speaking out about the genocide happening in Gaza. I can’t imagine having any kind of platform, even a small one, and not trying to use it for the things I believe in. Which isn’t to say that every book has to be political, but I want my next book to say something about the things that I’m thinking about.

I often struggle to reconcile my values with the ideal of “objectivity” in journalism.

There have absolutely been workplaces earlier in my career, especially in more traditional media, where it was against company policy to be a person in the world. To be political, to be someone who goes to a protest, someone who votes. The moment I realized I could do both was when I moved to Defector, where my coworkers and I are encouraged to be our full selves—to have opinions and let those opinions inflect our writing—which I think results in a more honest account of our stories. This is the first job where I haven’t been scared that someone will sit me down and say, “You can’t write about this incredibly personal thing and also interview someone about a squid that does something weird with its arm.” It’s really such a relief.

How has Defector shaped your approach to science writing?

I’ve done a couple stories from the perspective of animals. One recurring bit has me writing from the viewpoint of a frog subjected to various experiments. They’ll give a frog toxic beetles and then conclude, “Yeah, the beetle is toxic. The frog spit it out.” I’m left wondering, what is the experience of that frog? What stories does the frog have to share? This obviously isn’t traditional journalism—it’s journalism in the sense that I read [scientific] papers and use the findings to inform the blog—but I’m grateful to work somewhere that lets me experiment and bring a voice to the animals I write about, even if that means literally writing as them.

I imagine climate change makes writing about the natural world feel heavier, more complicated.

Sometimes, when I’m doing my job, I’ll read a report and imagine the future of where I’m standing right now, or the natural places that are sacred to me, and I will feel just unimaginable dread.

What helps you move through that?

The only thing is [taking] direct action against climate change, whether that’s writing to a representative, signing a petition, or doing a beach cleanup. Having that practice in my everyday life takes a lot of pressure off the work, because there’s no real way to measure the transformation an essay can provoke. There’s no way to see if a piece of writing has actually moved the needle on anything. I think the responsibility, then, is to make sure you’re doing that in your personal life, and maybe in your job, and in the ways you move about the world.

You’ve shared that your goal this year is to spend more time with the wildlife in and around New York City.

Yeah. I think trying to immerse myself in the city’s wildlife has helped get my gears whirring. New York has a lot of urban wildlife, but it’s very urban, right? There are a lot of pigeons, rats, roaches: animals that we consider pests because of the way they live beside us, or their potential to transmit diseases. It’s been good practice to sit with the complicated, entangled relationships people have with these creatures, because that’s the structure I want for my essays. I want to think about that entanglement. I want to imagine the ways I could be further entangled with the nonhuman.

For many artists, time outdoors can be creatively restorative. For you, it’s often part of the work itself.

When I go into nature, I’m always hoping for some kind of encounter with another species, whether it’s a lichen or a mushroom or a little newt in a pond. But I want to have so many of these encounters that I’m not always trawling for meaning. The more I can be around other species, the less each encounter has to mean, and the less pressure I can put on myself to take notes. I think it’s so important for artists of any kind to have things that are like, this is just for me. This isn’t something I’m going to turn into art or anything I’ll write about.

How else do you recharge? Are you secretly a painter?

I’m not a painter or a sculptor, unfortunately. But something core to my creative practice is watching absolute trash. If I watch all of Love Island USA in a couple of weeks, it won’t bleed into any of my essays. That is just for me. I really believe in the transformative, meditative power of watching trash and letting it purge your mind.

I feel similarly about long-running sitcoms from the 2010s. Does that practice keep you from getting creatively stuck?

I still get stuck all the time when I’m writing memoir and more personal stuff. Initially, I would become mired in the research process, but I quickly realized I wasn’t going to earn a PhD in cuttlefish while writing an essay.

How do you navigate those moments?

I’m a strong believer in letting my stuff incubate. If I have an idea and I get stuck while writing, after a day of trying to push through, I’ll usually set it aside for a couple of weeks. By the time I return to the essay, I can look at it with interest rather than revulsion.

I also really believe in writing what feels most important to you in the moment. I just came back from a weekend retreat where I’d planned to work on a specific essay for my Bug Book, but as soon as I got there, I was like, I actually want to write this new thing I just came up with. I just won’t be able to work on that first essay if I’m thinking about this newer, more fun essay.

I’m picturing the Distracted Boyfriend meme.

The inherent polyamory of an essay collection.

I’m glad you mentioned cuttlefish, because your essay “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish,” about your evolving relationship with gender, is one of my favorites in How Far the Light Reaches—especially because it doesn’t force a resolution. Can we talk about how you made peace with the gap between the self who wrote the essay and who you are now?

I knew I had to make peace with the gap because my book was due. But also, I’d been working on this essay for three years, and every time I wrote it, the answer was different. I conceptualized “Morphing Like a Cuttlefish” as an essay where I would figure out my gender, and eventually, I just realized I wasn’t going to find an answer I could feel locked into forever. And that’s not the point of the essay, right? The reader doesn’t need me to find a label; that’s not the takeaway. The story isn’t about me going from point A to point B, but about the iterative process itself.

I remember reading a tweet years ago that said something like, “If something really important happens to you, don’t write an essay about it when you’re 20.” I thought that was wild. I could die at any second, and you want me to hold off on my best material for when I’m older?

And there’s always revision.

Absolutely. I don’t think it’s a bad practice to publish an essay knowing that you might want to revisit it someday. I would encourage anyone publishing essays to make sure they retain the intellectual property rights to their work.

As a reader, I love when people look back at the original thing and say, “actually, here are the ways I still wasn’t being honest with myself,” or “this is where I still have something to learn.” I was definitely thinking about that with my cuttlefish essay. I realized it would be silly to think, at 26, This will be the only essay I ever write about my gender. But then, not writing about my gender until I was 40 also felt wild, since I process so much about myself through writing. Would I just not understand this part of myself until I chose to write about it? There’s always going to be a gap, in any essay. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that something I’ve written would stand the test of time, or that I’d never have any regrets about it. I think it helps to just get comfortable with letting go.

Sabrina Imbler recommends:

Caramel Apple Pops: It’s fall, and I need my sweetie treaties.

Apple snail egg crushing videos: The snails, which are not native to the US, are a major agricultural pest. Their eggs look just like underripe raspberries and make gorgeous ASMR crunching sounds when you smush them. I wish I could eat the apple snail eggs. But I cannot. So instead I watch people crush them.

Borealis by Aisha Sabatani Sloan: A gorgeous interrogation of space, glaciers, exes, eagles, seals, freedom, nature, lesbians, Lorna Simpson, and love. This is an essay I return to time and time again when I need to remember what an essay is, and what it can be.

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: She swears she was not on psychedelics when she wrote this, and yet! Maybe the greatest drug is watching a frog deflating in real time, drained by a giant water bug. Maybe it is looking for holiness in whatever surrounds you.

Moral courage: If your job, in media or wherever else, demands your silence on the genocide in Gaza or any other moral atrocity, consider that this exchange is not, and will never be, worth whatever your company wants you to believe. Quit your job. Find a new one that will let you grow as a person, expand your empathy, and keep your soul. I promise that you will never regret walking away.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Angelina Mazza.

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