Washed Series: Explore Radical Models of Family, Community, and Care with Sabrina Imbler, Author of “How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures”

Monday, October 7, 5:30 to 7pm: Join Providence Public Library for an evening with science and conservation journalist Sabrina Imbler on How Far the Light Reaches: lluminating Queerness in Nature, exploring radical models of family, community, identity, and care through the exploration of undersea life forms.

The ocean is exuberantly queer—just look at sex-changing clownfish and gay whales. But the natural world does not just parallel our own. It also offers radical models of the queer ways we can transform our communities, imagine ourselves, and care for each other. Sabrina Imbler’s book, How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures, melds marine biology and memoir to find meaning and intertwine ourselves with the more-than-human world.

Exploring themes of adaptation, survival, sexuality, and care, and weaving the wonders of marine biology with stories of their own family, relationships, and coming of age, Imbler explores their queer identity through the underwater dance parties of the yeti crab, grapples with living as a mixed-race person through hybridized fish, and finds other unexpected connections in essays that are poetic and intimate. How Far the Light Reaches attunes readers to new ways of thinking about the “natural” world and the “social” world, questioning the distinctions in ways that paradoxically allow us to see each with more dimensionality and depth.

This event is free and open to the public and takes place in the third floor Seminar Room; seating is limited and registration is encouraged!

This talk is part of PPL’s series Washed, which posits the sea as a dynamic space of ungovernability, constant motion, unfixability, and indeterminacy, and investigates how this state of fluidity makes it a potential space of literal and metaphorical transformation, transit, migration, dissolution, washing away, anointing, forgetting, and renewal. Join them this year to consider the role of water within our histories and futures, and engage with issues around identity, environmental justice, sea rise, fishing and harvesting rights, energy sourcing, and coastal access – impacting all of us who live within the fragile ecosystem of the “Ocean State,” and our region (and world) more broadly. 

Washed is made possible in part through a grant from RI Humanities.

photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan