My Life in Sea Creatures: A young queer science writer’s reflections on identity and the ocean

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It’s a gloriously queer narrative, exploring Imbler’s relationships, gender, and queer community more generally. They also discuss their mixed race identity, both personally and in relation to their mixed race partner. In one essay, they write about how to give a necropsy report of dead whales, and then they reiterate different versions of the necropsy report of a previous relationship, giving a different proposed cause of death each time. I really liked this book. It was funny, interesting, sad, and educational. It made me long for a world where people do not see your color, or who you are attracted to, and judge you off of it. It also made me feel bad for these creatures. As bad as we are to other humans, we are even worse to creatures we do not understand. Torturing jellyfish to make them rebirth, or using a special machine to literally shred thousands into little pieces. Ripping mothers away from their eggs, leaving all the eggs to die, because they want to study them. Polluting the rivers and causing one of the oldest existing fish to start dying out. The list goes on, why can't humans just let creatures live? I think my expectations for this book of hybrid memoir / essays was a bit too high, so I ended up being disappointed. Although I enjoyed both aspects of Imbler's writing -- science journalism about interesting sea creatures and personal stories about their queer identity and experiences -- the essays felt like two alternating threads that weren't well integrated. The Umibozu is a sea spirit from Japanese mythology who resides in the ocean. He emerges on a calm sea that suddenly turns stormy and sinks ships and drowns sailors. You don’t need to do much to antagonize Umibozu. If you speak to him the result is the capsizing of the ship and the death of many sailors. 19. Leviathan

Mussie is a local name for a mythical sea creature thought to be living in Muskrat Lake, Ontario, Canada for quite some time. As legend would have it, Mussie is said to be around 24′ long, with 3 ears and 3 eyes, closely resembling either a walrus, a sturgeon, or a 3 eyed Loch Ness monster. Mussies’ diet on Muskrat lake reportedly consists of cattails! 32. The Cirein-Croin Sabrina Imbler’s dazzling new collection of essays, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, interweaves the magic of these sea dwellers with Imbler’s musings on the human experience. SN: How did you approach thinking and writing about the corporeal in the context of thinking about bodies of people and sea creatures, and also thinking and feeling your way around your body and your own corporeal experiences? Compulsively readable, beautifully lyric, and wildly tender [...] A breathtaking, mesmerizing debut from a tremendous talent" Although there have been as many as 1,000 sightings of “Nessie” most have been disproved and many scholars have concluded that the sea monster is only a psychological figment of peoples’ imaginations. 2. The KrakenLusca is a giant sea monster living in the Blue Hole near the island of Andros in the Bahamas This mythical sea creature is said to be enormous, resembling a giant octopus or giant squid and allegedly measuring a whopping 75 feet in length. 23. Vodyanoy In Greek mythology, Charybdis along with Scylla, another fallen sea nymph turned sea monster, is a feared mythical sea creature who patrols the Strait of Messina. Together with Scylla, Charybdis terrorizes sailors and other Greek heroes including Odysseus, Jason, and Aeneas. 6. Nereus How to Draw a Sperm Whale: I liked this one, although the formatting it vaguely like a report was a challenge. This one tries to parallel their college thesis on sperm whales, information on necropsies, and their first girlfriend, M. (they abbreviate it 'M,' which I found distracting, like we were reading an impression of a medical report, except medical reports would no longer use abbreviations). Given how much I abhor whaling, even the historical accounts of it, it was hard to warm to this section. However, I thought it awkwardly done and felt, well, like a college writing project.

Some of these hazards include jellyfish stings, stingray stings, and another biting, stinging or leeching animals. Residing in Lake Lerna, the Lernean Hydra is a mythical sea creature from both Greek and Roman mythology that has several heads. It was believed that Lerna was the entrance to the underworld due to the presence of the Lernean Hydra who spent a lot of time terrorizing the countryside around Lake Lerna. 18. UmibozuI also thought thematically the connections between the sea creatures and Imbler's life didn't quite resonate. Although I loved the idea of combining these two disparate genres, the execution didn't work for me. That said, I learned a lot of cool stuff about the ocean and its inhabitants that I won't forget and I appreciated getting this information from a queer feminist mixed race perspective. I would have liked a book that was just that better, I think. We Swarm: Riis Beach, New York: famous for queer culture, there was a time they were there during an inundation of blobby creatures, perhaps salps. Salps periodically swarm for food, unlike Pride in NYC, which is for a variety of reasons. This is a fun piece, a delightful break from the emotional challenge of 'Striker,' or the intellectual challenge of 'Hybrid.' A selkie is a mythical sea creature or water spirit that can change from a seal to a human by shedding their skin, hence the name Selkie, or “seal folk”. Selkies originated in Norse and Celtic mythology and are believed to reside in the Northern Islands of Scotland. 43. Bunyip

How did you think about time and the scale of time while you were writing this, and how did studying the myriad of ways life changes and persists in the ocean make you think about how time and life interact with each other?

Working at the nexus of nature writing and memoir, Sabrina Imbler is beautifully reinventing both genres" From the land down under, there is a mythical sea creature known as a bunyip. In Aboriginal Australia, the mythical sea creature named bunyip is translated to mean “devil or evil spirit”. Allegedly the bunyip occupies swamps, lagoons, creeks, riverbeds, and waterholes all over the interior of Australia. The bunyip is also a tad bit moody, with moods ranging from ferocious predator to gentle herbivore. 44. Water Leaper Rusalka is a Slavic term describing a female mythical sea creature, namely a mermaid, who is hostile in her dealings with humans. She is said to be either the soul of a child who died unbaptized or a virgin who drowned. She inhabits the Danube river and her counterparts allegedly live in parts of France and Germany. Beautiful and charming, Rusalka is also said to be vile and cunning. 40. Chessie