IT’S HARD TO FIND the moment where I first knew I was writing a book about fish, or, really, writing a book at all.

My notes, initially to myself, about making a child were simply an outpouring of emotion that could barely be contained by language and could not be contained internally. Words spilled out in text messages, my notes app, across stray pieces of paper, in Google documents I organized poorly or not at all. We called the kid we were making together an animal, and she became a real fish to me. I had written thousands of words, collected fish facts like amulets by the time my friend Lulu Miller published her bookWhy Fish Don’t Existin 2020.Lars Horn’s memoir-in-essaysVoice of the Fishcame out in 2022, followed by Sabrina Imbler’s stunning bookHow Far the Light Reacheslater that same year. All the while, my own fish-book,Spawning Season, was turning from a fertilized egg into a free-swimming parr.

Even as I was writing, I found something strange and magical about the fact that four queer writers all found a form for our work in sea creatures, in fish. I wanted to gather this group to talk about writing, craft, queer life, and the sea. What follows is a collaborative conversation, with each writer creating and answering the questions, swimming between ideas and material reality, making sense of the vastness of life on earth below the surface. The animal eye likely evolved only once, when all animals swam in the ocean. That is the magic of the sea: our animal eyes cannot easily see there, and so we are forced to study, to voyage, to imagine, and to look back at the most profound and indescribable moments of humanity—grief, pleasure, connection, loss, family-making—with new eyes.

– Joseph Osmundson

How did fish (or other sea creatures) come to be one of the main organizing principles of your book?

Sabrina Imbler (SI): I wish I had a more poetic answer, but I have just always loved the sea and everything swimming (or floating aimlessly) in it. When I first started writing essays that braided my personal experience with animals, sea creatures were an obvious choice, simply because I knew more about them than most other types of animals. But the more I wrote into these connections, the more convinced I became that the ocean is the queerest biome. It turns out bodies can become very flamboyant when you’re operating in three dimensions!

Lars Horn (LH): My curiosity and obsession have orbited aquatic bodies—water, sea creatures—so enduringly that they began the book, rather than entering the narrative to shape it. For a couple of years, I maintained a collection of folders and open-ended (chaotic) documents of cuttings or transcribed facts about sea life. I was working with shortform at the time and wanted to combine the essay and the prose poem so that I might create a form that could, in a strange sense, work akin to religious iconography. From these personal archives, I built the vignettes in Voice of the Fish, which sit between both the stand-alone essays and the threaded essay on aquariums. Only after several rounds of editorial feedback, did I realize that I had not spoken of my relationship to embodiment, that transmasculinity was largely absent, and that I hadn’t explicitly explored how aquatic bodies might allow us to reconsider the human body. This prompted me to write the threaded essay that runs across the book combining aquatic life, aquariums, and my own corporeality—its rites and reckonings. In this sense, I always think the fish exist, in a sense, outside of the manuscript’s timeframe or concerns. They are of a ritual time and a personal sanctity, that which came before the project, which endures beyond it.

Lulu Miller (LM): For me, the fact that fish became the central character of my book was an absolute plot twist. I set out to find out what happened to a very obsessive man and discovered his pathos helped to shatter the scientific category of “fish.” Fish don’t exist, I learned. Not to scientists. That fact tickled me, delighted me, puzzled me. To really understand what it meant, ended up requiring a deep dive (sorry) into the nuances of the aquatic creatures I’d spent nearly four decades believing were all of a kind.

Joseph Osmundson (JO): I wrote in Spawning Season that my not-yet-born child came to me in a dream as a fish, and this is just what happened. In a way, I didn’t choose fish; they chose me. I’m from Washington State and an ink print of a Steelhead my dad caught and used to feed our family was one of our only pieces of art growing up. I think, from as early as I could remember, everyone around considered salmon beautiful, and knew we had to kill and eat them to live. There’s something in this brutality that felt inextricable from making a child. It made me understand my father and his ink print. I’d have killed a million fish to feed her.

I found it far easier to find empathy and tenderness for animals like fish than I did with former versions of myself.

What is it about fish, the ocean, and animals that dwell there that made telling your story more possible?

SI: When I started the book, I don’t think I realized that I found it far easier to find empathy and tenderness for animals like fish than I did with former versions of myself. It was only when I juxtaposed our stories that I saw how harshly I had judged myself, when I was just another organism trying to survive. In this light, I found it helpful to write about myself the way I would a fish, such as thinking about times when I’ve had to adapt, evolve, or escape, and to write about a fish the way I would write about another person, which meant treating them as an individual whose life story matters, not just as a member of a school or a swarm. Flipping these lenses helped me locate the scared animal in me and the grand life story of a creature like an octopus or a butterflyfish. I suppose fish helped me care for my past self in ways that had never felt possible before.

JO: I was dealing with the immensity of grief, of loss. I often find out how to write about a difficult topic by doing it. And this is one thing I think craft does for us: it gives us the skills we need in order to survive writing about the topics that might kill us to write, and will kill us not to write. Writing about my lost almost-child as a sea creature gave me an external place to put my feelings. She was real, but this writing gave her a body. I wrote in Spawning Season, that “I could only grieve what I’ve heard scream,” and she didn’t have a mouth until she became a fish.

LH: I find humanity beautiful, mesmerizing, and, at times, am profoundly moved by certain acts of love or care. But I also tire of human endeavor—the insatiable expansion, the cruelty, harm. That power always conserves and protects power, that whiteness, class, cisheteronormativity, genocide, climate change and climate racism, that they will never abate. I am often most aggrieved by my doubt that these centers of power might ever be destabilized.

Aquatic life—and this is not to romanticize other species, they can also be ferocious, ruthless, but perhaps are more honest in their need and desire for self-preservation—allowed me to triangulate beyond the human. I could find breadth in bodies and ecosystems radically different from my own daily concerns. Water, and the bodies within it, possess a majesty, one before which I am irrelevant. There are moments, rare ones, when life stills long enough, a day closes, when I might briefly, just briefly, touch a sense of time unfolding, of purpose, something akin to God, in which I am relieved to be of irrelevance. Aquatic life provided me the sense of irrelevance before a greater body and power, which in turn made me wish to honor it, even if moderately. In that sense, writing my own personhood was easier because it felt of lesser importance, a tangent rather than the focus.

LM: Fluidity, baby! How lovely that not only the category of fish is fluid but so too are the creatures themselves. Queerness seems to be the norm down there. Creatures can shift sexes with ease–gonads, body parts, the whole shebang—many species can even go back and forth within a single lifetime. But it’s not only that, they can also shift colors, shape-shift, shoot electricity; they thrive in community, in solitude, in pressure that would crush us instantly; they can become invisible and create light out of darkness. They are liquid creatures. And this is who we came from.

Water, and the bodies within it, possess a majesty, one before which I am irrelevant.

Each of us writes about our lives, queerness/transness, and the body in unexpected ways, and each of us found our way to ocean life to consider these topics, maybe especially bodies. What is it about animals, and fish in particular, that resonates with you as a queer/trans writer?

SI: Fish occupy a totally different sliver of the planet than we do. In the ocean, sound travels far further than light, so they rely on different senses to navigate, find each other, and mate. I loved learning about how their bodies diverged from mine, and how their bodily adaptations inspired me to push the limits of my own. I found a particular kinship with deep-sea creatures, who are often described in terms of estrangement, as “aliens” who survive on the scraps of sun-touched society. But many deep-sea creatures that live by hydrothermal vents, which are gaps in the seafloor where geothermally heated water surges through, forgo the sun entirely, and survive on chemosynthesis, spinning sugars from the chemicals of the crust of the Earth. This reminded me of the way queer people are often exiled to the margins of society, and yet we manage to create these fantastical spaces that are wilder than anything the straights could have imagined.

LH: Aquatic species defy human-centric concepts of embodiment. Hundreds of fish species change sex across a lifetime. The Greenland shark can slowly circle the ocean for half a millennium. Sturgeons first entered the fossil record 150-200 million years ago, and still slink through lakes and waterways. It is a temporal bridge, echoing us into a memory of prehistory. These forms of life challenge how humanity thinks of gender, sex, duration—to name but a few. Aquatic life has abided on this Earth in ways human civilizations have not. Their bodies have acclimatized in ways humans have not. They are, to my own land-bound body, wholly other. As is water itself as an environment. It tides, rivers, it is force and energy. Salinity, sediment. I am also always in awe of how oceans not only stretch across vast distances but plunge to haunting depth, as if the ocean contains secretive dimension. Aquatic bodies, both sea life and the very water that holds them, are queer to my mind insofar as they present me with radical difference from myself. They remain opaque, unknowable, holding questions more than yielding answers. And in conserving mystery, they leave room for imagining, for leaps of faith—qualities, I might venture, are quite trans.

LM: Is it now that I can talk about being a Pisces? I don’t usually do that. All this fishtalk has me liberated. I am a Pisces, most at home in the water. Yes, metaphorically—I get lost in currents, in daydreams, lose track of time, communicate telepathically, from time to time, with other Pisces—but also literally. I was not able to survive in Chicago (where we moved for my wife’s job a few years ago) until I learned how to polar plunge into Lake Michigan. Without water, without being able to swim, to submerge and flip, I shrivel. When I swim, I feel safe; bad memories and thoughts can’t get me; they crowd the surface, unable to break the surface tension. I open my eyes and wave at them. I never swim with goggles, I like the cool water to touch my retinas, to blur and clear my vision. I think what I am doing is remembering my fluidity, our kin, the queerness not just of my body and lust, but of the self, the pressure of our ancestors embracing every part of me, reminding me of the singularity from which we all came, this one tiny dot of all matter pressed together where, as poet Marie Howe puts it, there was “No I, no We, no one. No was / No verb      no noun / only a tiny tiny dot brimming with /  is is is is is / All   everything   home.”

JO: Of course we are both Pisces, Lulu. I forget this all the time, but then am not surprised to find out again, anew.

As a fellow Pisces (lolsob), I always feel that I am more porous to the world than most people. My body takes on the feelings of others so easily. It reads the room to a fault, and the outcome ranges from something like anxiety to something like abject dread.

Fish, living as they do in water, are likewise more porous than land animals to their surroundings. Animals are made of water. We land animals lose water all the time through evaporation, sure, but living in water makes a fish co-constitutive with its environment in a way we don’t quite experience. I like this notion that the outside seeps in, I like the vulnerability that it allows, indeed forces us to acknowledge: we are made by what we swim inside.

When I swim, I feel safe; bad memories and thoughts can’t get me; they crowd the surface, unable to break the surface tension. I open my eyes and wave at them.

As we see in all of our books, fish are both incredibly robust (they’re everywhere, even after the light ends; they hybridize; they go feral and more-than survive; they’ve held ancient manuscripts in their bellies for hundreds of years) but are also vulnerable in ways that land animals might not be (chemicals leach through their skin, they live in the ocean, where temperature rise is acute, they’re sensitive to disease and invasive species). Is there anything in particular about ocean life that allows you to consider or reconsider ecology, history, and climate in your own life and writing?

SI: I think of the Greenland shark—which Lars wrote so beautifully about in Voice of the Fish—which can live for centuries orbiting the frigid waters of the twilight zone. Or the bowhead whale, which can live more than 200 years, or a clam called the ocean quahog, which can live for 500. It astounds me how some of these animals have lived through so many of our wars, political divisions, inventions good and bad. They are swimming (or, in the clam’s case, filter-feeding) archives of the planet, living world wonders. I am not interested in science that aims to steal their secrets to longevity. Rather, their lifespans feel like a kind of knowledge that is inaccessible to our shorter-sighted species, and I’m endlessly curious to know how their bodies have felt the changes we’ve wrought on the planet and the ocean.

LH: Water and aquatic life remind me acutely of our interconnectivity. Obviously, land-based, oxygen-breathing lifeforms are no less connected than aquatic ones, but the more tangible physicality of water—its more obvious physical “holding” of bodies—reminds me to reconsider the experiential as ecosystem, as body unto body, and our responsibility to others in our own actions.

I am drawn to the long duration—the ongoing labor of a body and life, and those long labors that exceed them. I find solace in ritual time, knowledge that I will enter and exit this world without fanfare, my life its own dawn and dusk amidst so many others. In a strange way, I find aquatic bodies, and nature more broadly, to be in conjunction with how I experience faith—this reaching beyond oneself, this momentary sense of rhythm or consequence. This is to say, the choice to write of that which speaks from the past, which is able to carry ancient time toward us—that might speak to the anachronism inherent in my Catholicism as much as it does to my love of the aquatic. Both are forms of song, even prayer, and both have the ability to call forward and back. In this, they contextualize and recontextualize the specifics of a body in time and place, which makes them rich methods of deriving and generating meaning.

JO: For me, in writing about parenthood, the salmon life cycle was somewhat of a foundation. I’m from the Pacific Northwest, and these fish were ever present in our self-mythology. They swim hundreds, even a thousand, miles upstream to mate, and once they mate, they die, with their rotting flesh leaving nutrients captured in the sea in the soil such that the entire river or stream ecosystem can thrive. This is how I felt about having children myself, but I couldn’t tell the story only about myself. It only came out when I realized that all I wanted to be in life was like this fish.

LM: It is an example from Sabrina’s book, How Far the Light Reaches. The monocle bream. Oh, bless the monocle bream. Bless Sabrina for writing about the monocle bream. I think about it often. Monocle breams are tiny fish that will risk their own lives to warn one another of a sandstriker worm lying in wait. I’m sure the scientists write this off as “kin selection,” a sacrificing of the self to save kin, aka still in the name of passing on its genes and thus selfish. But I can’t unsee this tiny fish, who does not run past danger, but stops, cocks its head and blows some bubbles or whatever, and risks death to help its neighbor. Maybe there is hope for us. Maybe demagogues don’t hold all the power, yes, they prey on fear, but there is prey who does not always obey fear.

In terms of the craft of nonfiction, how do you try to merge writing the scientific with the personal, political, and ecological? Are fish a bridge, a wedge, an example, a lever, a holy text, or simply unavoidable?

SI: I love love love the idea of fish being a bridge, a wedge, a level, a holy text, or all of the above! In How Far the Light Reaches, I think fish (and sea creatures more broadly) became a mirror for my own experiences. Sometimes they reflected my life, and sometimes they refracted it. I looked to their lives to understand my own. But in the writing I’m doing now, which still weaves together metaphors of the non-human and human, I’m trying to further entangle myself with the animals I write about. Can a horseshoe crab be a collaborator on an essay? Can a hermit crab be a blueprint for trans embodiment? Can a leech be an arbiter of desire? I suppose I am interested this time in letting the animals speak back to me in the ways that feel possible, so I am not simply writing my story over them.

JO: I think very, very often about how much the Enlightenment got wrong, especially around evolution and biology. Humans are not some magical top of the tip of the pyramid of life, perfected by God. Like oh my god, please smell my farts and then think I am some being made by God in him/her image.

Evolution, and life as it acts through evolution, is messy, impermanent, inefficient, and only ever responsive to an elusive now that can never be reconstructed. My previous books used viruses to this effect; these tiny, odd life forms defy so much of our expectations, even as we live with them intuitively as the things that cause the common cold, an infection we experience before we have any language at all to describe it. So, fish, like viruses, allowed me to make life, and biology, unfamiliar to myself first, make sense in order to see things I was hiding in my subconscious—namely, for this book, just how much I would have given to have a kid of my own. Fish die trying to mate or they die just after having mated; there is no other option. I found myself longing to be a fish—to be dead, so as not to feel anything, grief included, or to be a mother.

LH: I agree with you, Joe and Sabrina, that fish are bridge, wedge, level, and holy text. I mentioned earlier in this conversation that I had wanted to write shortform essays that held something of the religious icon—a still, yet dense, reflective moment. Aquatic bodies are certainly in the order of the sacred to me, personally, but, in Voice of the Fish, I tended to treat them as touchstone, even a chorus, in many ways, allowing me to return, renew, redirect. They simultaneously harmonized and diverted the manuscript, much like a shoal—body of bodies. As for the pragmatics of how to merge personal, scientific, political, and ecological narratives, I think it’s worth noting that they are already inextricably enmeshed. None of us exist severed from social, political, or ecological spheres, so, I find, it’s usually a case of understanding which ties are the ones I wish to illuminate. It’s less a case of knitting the realms together and more of honing in on which existing hinges, connections, parallels or echoes are pertinent to the arc and questions of the essay. The craft, a labor in perspective, point of entry, and curation.

LM: Oh, how I love the word shoal. Lars, you just reminded me. What is a shoal? A shelf? A school? A boundary? Solid ground? A shadow? Is it all of those things? It’s a great word. A shifty, visually-onomatopoeic word that sounds like what it looks like. A thing that, even when you stare straight at it, resembles periphery.

I just learned about catfish. That they can . . . they can walk around on land! For days, in some cases. Breathing? Ain’t no thing. The issue with fish in the air, for many fishy creatures, isn’t about oxygen; it’s a more simple mechanical issue. Most of their gills will flap shut when they’re in the air. But certain species of catfish have hard enough gills that they can stay open in the air, so they are totally fine extracting oxygen while on land.

This story reminds me how flexible life is, how most of the hard lines we draw over nature aren’t hard. They are just guesses. This seems like an invitation to rethink our limits, maybe there’s something we believe to be a fundamental inability in ourselves, perhaps we are wrong about it, about ourselves.

Lars, Thanks for reminding me of that shimmery, shiftying, wonderful word. It reminds me how you can focus on the gaps in a community, where it is not there for you, or you can focus on the glints where it is. I hear Lars calling fish a community. I hear Sabrina calling fish a conversational partner. Both of those resonate for me; I’d add that for me they are also an escape hatch. A promise, or reminder, just below the surface that Earthly existence can be wilder than our expectations for it.

I like this notion that the outside seeps in, I like the vulnerability that it allows, indeed forces us to acknowledge: we are made by what we swim inside.

Are there any other animals, creatures, plants, ecosystems, planets, molecules, stars that are giving you guidance, craft, or solace these days?

LM: Weeds! Or “secondary succession plants” as they call ‘em in the botany biz. These things rush in and grow so fast after a landscape has been injured. Part of their job is to mend, to preserve what is still good in the land. I find that so beautiful, so hopeful.

SI: Bugs, which I am defining very expansively as anything creepy or crawling. So my forthcoming bug book of course has a horseshoe and a hermit crab (neither of which are crabs, funnily enough) and a sea slug, which was actually an organism that got cut from my first book. And what a relief, because this sea slug essay is so much better than the one I had originally imagined.

JO: I have been longing for the desert, a place to dry out. The desert feels to me like another place that initially may seem empty—like the vastness of the sea—but teems with life that has evolved to survive the extremes. An environment may be extreme, like the deep sea or the desert, but laid out longways, any one life will contain extremes as well, summers of record highs. I’m at the age where many people I know are losing their parents, what a mundane, routine, horrific part of life itself. I want to walk alone up and down hills, feel the sun, the earth under me, and return home with legs rust-red with dirt that I refuse to wash off.

LH: Love a planet. Great sundering and soldering of bodies.

Do you have any final words to say to the fish or sea creatures who guided you through writing your books?

SI: BEST FISHES!

LH: I love you.

LM: High five, partner.

JO: Thanks for saving my life.

Bring home Joseph’s Spawning Seasontoday!