In this episode of Strange Horizons at 25, editor Kat Kourbeti chats to author Debbie Urbanski about her 2018 Strange Horizons publication and the 13 years of submissions it took to get accepted, writing in the gray areas between genres, and what it means to be artistically honest in your work.

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Episode show notes:

• Read Debbie Urbanski's story, Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou (Based on Early Interactions)
• Visit her website, or follow her on Instagram and Substack
• Buy her book, After World, or her short story collection Portalmania
• Read Andy Sawyer's Strange Horizons review of After World
• Find more links to her work and other things mentioned throughout the transcript below.

Transcript

Kat Kourbeti: Hello Strangers, and welcome to Strange Horizons at 25, a 25th anniversary celebration of Strange Horizons. I'm your host, Kat Kourbeti, and it is my privilege today to welcome you to another episode that looks back at the history and impact of Strange Horizons on the speculative genres.

Today's guest is Debbie Urbanski, who was published with us in 2018, and has since gone on to publish a debut novel, as well as a collection of stories. She has been long listed for the Otherwise Award twice, among other nominations, and has written short fiction for F&SF, Lightspeed, and so much more. It's great to have you here, Debbie.

Debbie Urbanski: Thanks for having me, and happy 25th.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you so much. It's very exciting, because you don't really think about the longevity of a magazine in your day to day. You're just doing it to do it. But time ticks by, and it collects, and somehow... 25 years.

Debbie Urbanski: And it's huge, yeah, that you guys are thriving right now.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, thank you.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. Really important. Fabulous.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, I appreciate it.

Did you read Strange Horizons much before submitting to us?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah, and I did go back to prepare for this. I was curious the first time I submitted to you guys, and it was in 2005. So I had submitted for 13 years before I got the acceptance.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Okay. Wow. It's so interesting how diverse the experience is of people on this podcast, because you really just get the whole gamut. So 13 years of submissions, that's a lot.

Debbie Urbanski: I got some really nice personal notes from various editors along the way, starting with Jed (Hartman). And then when the acceptance finally came, it was a rewrite, so like a conditional acceptance.

Kat Kourbeti: Interesting. Ooh, I wanna hear about this, 'cause I don't think I've heard very much in that vein from people yet.

So let's talk a little bit about the story first. It's called Some Personal Arguments in Support of the BetterYou, Based on Early Interactions. And it's kinda sorta a product review, kinda sorta a diary, it's a mixed bag. Can you tell me a little bit about the process of writing the story?

Debbie Urbanski: Sure. So I was interested at the time to experiment with form. The straightforward story wasn't really feeling like a good fit at the time, so I wanted to try writing something that was like a product review leaning towards essay, and there was a lot of stuff in my life that I wanted to explore in a fictional way too.

I was interested in like, what if the partner you're with is the right partner, but not perfect. Or you know, what if you really want your partner, but you want your partner to be different and the partner can't be. Kind of those situations and yeah, I imagined what if there was this other android, who could fulfill everything that your partner needs in your relationship?

Kat Kourbeti: It is "positive" ultimately, I guess, in terms of reviewing the product, but I think that there are some moments that there's doubt about whether or not it's a good product and/or perfect. 'Cause even the main character is a bit conflicted sometimes, but ultimately, I think swivels around, would you say?

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. I was interested in the point of view of someone who thought this would be a good thing for their relationship, and I found that to be really heartbreaking as a human being, that this character couldn't be accepted for who she was. And she decides to kind of disappear, in a way, from her life and think her family would be happier without her, which is really sad, and obviously it's not a good product.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, like she keeps saying like, "no, I think it's great that people can choose to buy a better version of themselves and have it around and it can do things." But then at the same time, she's like, "hmm, I'm not sure about you marketing this to marginalized communities. Maybe don't do that."

So now that we've touched upon it a little bit, tell me about the draft you sent in and how was it different?

Debbie Urbanski: The revision ideas were really thoughtful. The big one was asking, it was Lila (Garrott) who I was working with, and she wondered why asexuality in particular, which is how the narrator identifies, why asexuality isn't considered normalized by that point. 'Cause she thought there's a lot of good work being done in the ace community. Is it taking place far in the future or is it taking place now in just an alternate reality?

I decided to try and address that through saying the technology developed really fast, making it more set in the present than in a hundred years from now. Because I agree, like a hundred years from now, hopefully we'll accept people as they are, fingers crossed, in relationships as well as in general society.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I think that would've been my next question because I couldn't place when it was meant to be set, but I got a vibe of now because at the beginning it said, "you'd think we'd be able to go to Mars before we can edit our memories, but here we are," and it is in fact a little spooky that you wrote this in 2018, and now there's a lot of stuff being done that we really didn't think even back then we could do, and we can, and it's crazy how fast a lot of things have been flying.

So then you've decided to go ahead with those edits, but it didn't really change the themes or what you wanted to tell with the story.

Debbie Urbanski: No, and I think that's a sign of good editing, right? Where it still is your story, but makes more sense to the reader, more accessible. I think that would've been a distraction point. I think Lila was right. That wasn't really my intent to suggest the future will be just as hard as it is now for some.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, some of the phrases in there, you know, she says that she's of an older generation and "oh, well I'm not comfortable wearing the badge of my identity on my sleeve and doing all this pride stuff" basically—she doesn't say it in those words, but basically. It just really had me thinking about that and about the place of ace-spec people in the LGBT community and how, first of all, a lot of the time they're not welcomed by the LGBT community, which is nonsense. And at the same time it's about how you feel, right? And if you don't feel like you are part of that community, then perhaps trying to shoehorn you in there and just be like, "you're the A in the LGBTQIA"... If you don't wanna be a part of that, then where does that leave you as a person, floating in the world?

Debbie Urbanski: I think I was—I still kind of am interested in generational differences. I identify as asexual and I figured it out in like the 2000s, 2010s, which I think was a really different time. You know, it was a lot of Googling and just asexuality.org, pretty much. I was really struggling when I wrote this story with kind of the queer joy approach, which was great—I was really happy for those people. I just felt like, "man, I am in a tough situation right now in my experience. I can't get it to fit in with how other people are expressing their experience."

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Leaps and bounds have happened since the early 2000s, even in terms of how we talk about things, let alone studies and research and so on. And these are themes that you touch upon in your other work, and we'll get to that in a little bit.

But just to kind of wrap up the Strange Horizons portion of the experience, of doing the edits and sending the rewrite in, and then that was probably that?

Debbie Urbanski: I came to genre writing a little indirectly where I grew up reading a ton of genre. My dad's really into film, like 16 millimeter film, so we watched a lot of old sci-fi movies. Then I got my MFA in poetry, went that route, but I still really loved reading genre and so when I started to write it, I was less confident than with the literary fiction world. It was really affirming and exciting for me to get to be in Strange Horizons.

Kat Kourbeti: And we do publish poetry also, so if you ever write any spec poetry, you know where to find us!

Debbie Urbanski: I went in my records, it shows I was rejected on some of my poetry as well, but they were the nicest rejections. The person recommended other places for me to send, which I thought was so generous. Yeah, kudos to you folks at Strange Horizons for caring about the people who submit.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, for sure. A lot of the time our editors are writers themselves and so they know what that process is like and what it takes to send your work out in the first place. And especially I think in the poetry world, there's a lot of care to find the right venue, and these are the people who will know what other venues there might be. So that's great, I'm glad to hear that, but again, don't stop sending things. You never know!

I guess I wanna ask now a little bit more generally about your genre work. Where do you think you kind of land, genre wise, in your general work? Is it more sci-fi? Your novel is science fiction for sure, but then some of your short stories are more magic. So like, what's the vibe genre wise for you?

Debbie Urbanski: I like mixing things up a lot. I was interested in—I still am—horror more recently, and I think I like taking parts of genre that I love and try doing something different with it. So with my novel, for instance, post-apocalyptic fiction is one of my favorite genres. I don't totally understand why, it's like my comfort reading. Like I just, I'm really happy when I read post-apocalyptic fiction.

Kat Kourbeti: Yay. The world is over!

Debbie Urbanski: It's like a relief kind of!

I camp and hike, and I studied medieval history, so there's a nice intersection, I think of all those things in post-apocalyptic. You know, it's usually post technology and survivalist sort of stuff. I wanted to play around with that and try and write a really serious, realistic, super detailed story about someone who doesn't survive, essentially, for the novel.

Or for even the Portal stories, I wanted to write about people who aren't able to go through the portals. I really love portal stories too, just like traditional ones, or like The Chosen One stories. I wrote something for teens about the chosen person's friend, because I was thinking that's a really hard position to be in—

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: To be in a supporting character role. What I like doing is mixing things and playing around.

Kat Kourbeti: And you said you had a sideways entry into genre writing, but would you say that's where you live now, in genre?

Debbie Urbanski: I think probably to the detriment of my career, I still am all over the place. So while I was working on the story collection, pulling it together, I was writing these experimental essays that are really tough to place. One of the essays is called The Constraints of Fiction, (about) just how I felt like everybody from editors to readers to reviewers was telling me what a story should look like, and how I kind of wanted to break out of that.

I have a good friend whose son died by suicide and I met him nine months after that happened, and I was frustrated that the only skill I had, which was writing, could do nothing to help my friend. So I wrote a story where I imagined, it's kinda like an essay story, imagined trying to bring his son back through writing, which of course you can't do.

So I'm still in this nether world, maybe intersectional world.

Kat Kourbeti: That's a good place to be. You say the detriment of your career, but at the same time, I think it's more honest to keep all of that in play because that's you, and what you're interested in and what you enjoy and what you think about. So it's not exclusive, I don't think. I think it's more artistically honest to play around with all the things.

Debbie Urbanski: That's a beautiful framework, thank you for that. Yeah, that's true. For my next project, it's a weird time 'cause I finished these Portal stories that have been occupying me, kind of about personal stuff, finished my novel, and it finally feels like I could write about anything, but I don't know what that anything is! And I've been—ugh.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, if you don't have something kicking around, you then just open the windows in your brain and let something else in.

Debbie Urbanski: Something will come, I think.

Kat Kourbeti: Something will come.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah.

Kat Kourbeti: I believe it. You've also written a lot of different sort of formats. So where do you feel comfortable? Is it short fiction mostly, or novels? Or obviously a combination, but how do you operate as a writer, in terms of the length of things that you plan to write?

Debbie Urbanski: I wrote my novel because I wanted to have a story collection, that was my motivation, and I was trying to find an agent. And all the agents were asking, where's your novel? So stories are my first love for sure. Post-apocalyptic is my comfort genre, stories are my comfort place.

It's interesting that there's such hesitation in the commercial publishing world. I mean, my publisher was great and agreed to publish my collection. I'm so grateful. At the same time, there's not a big expectation for collections, and it's difficult to try and get them to the world. But I feel like stories are so perfect for our attention spans now, and to address all the stuff that's going on everywhere.

Kat Kourbeti: I find that really interesting. So maybe we can pick your brains about writing short and how you approach a short story, because it can be just such a personal thing to each writer, how the plot forms and how the characters form. Like in my case, I can't keep things short to save my life. I really wish I could, it's something I have to very consciously work at, as opposed to people like you for whom it's more of a natural sort of process. And I'm always fascinated with people's methods and with people's different ways of thinking about story.

So maybe you can walk me through sitting down and you're like, "I'm gonna write this story, I have an idea." First of all, do you outline it out first, or do you just kind of sit down and write and see what happens?

Debbie Urbanski: It's a bit of a chaotic method that I do, and I applied this to novel writing as well, which is probably why my novel took eight years to write. But I tend to write a little bit free association, in fragments or in chunks, and then I actually print everything out and then tear it up and then I reorder it on my floor.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh wow. Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: With the windows closed and kind of staple things together. You could probably see that in the Strange Horizon story a little— 'cause—

Kat Kourbeti: It is a little fragmented, yeah!

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. And I'm interested in the order of things, changing that around, and my mind just doesn't think in a linear fashion.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: I think it would be easier if it did, but kind of what you were saying before, you need to be honest with who you are artistically.

Kat Kourbeti: Exactly.

Debbie Urbanski: My mind's like, it is just...

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: All the things at once.

Kat Kourbeti: So going back to your Strange Horizons story then, because that is very fascinating: it is fragmentary in places, and that's why I said that it feels like a diary almost rather than a product review the whole way through, 'cause I think a product review would just be like, "here's what happened and that's my experience, five stars, everyone should buy one".

But this one has little snippets and little scenes and little thoughts even, that maybe don't have a specific incident, but it's like, "hmm, I was thinking this", and then there's another section. And you don't see that very much in short stories, not super often, like that many different little jumbled thoughts, but it made sense for this character. I didn't think, "huh, this is really scattered". I just thought it makes sense for this character to be having all of these different thoughts, because it's quite a difficult and emotionally charged thing that she's going through.

So would you say that is reflected in your other short fiction as well?

Debbie Urbanski: I think at one stage in the writing process, I'm sure, yes. Sometimes I do try and do the transitions more, smooth things over, or I go through phases where I don't want any breaks, so I try and have a single scene.

One thing I like about the story form is I think it allows me to play with form and not exhaust the reader to such a degree. One of my favorite stories I wrote was a bunch of dictionary entries, of words that I made up from the future, and the person's trying to write a dictionary and explain what's happening in the world.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: But that format was perfect for me because I got to have little definitions, and I got to include some(thing) personal, if I wanted, and kind of develop things as it goes through the alphabet.

Kat Kourbeti: Wow. Yeah, okay. Again, finding ways for that thinking to work with a format that you're making up. I feel like that is also perhaps coming from your poetry background, because poetry can be whatever you want.

Debbie Urbanski: That's great, yeah, that's super interesting.

Kat Kourbeti: And now that I know that you've done an MFA in poetry, I'm like, this is making sense actually, because you don't have to write a poem top to bottom, and it doesn't always have to follow a form. Some forms do, there's types of poems that do have rules you have to follow for it to make sense and so on. But not everything is.

I'm like, "ooh, but you're doing this with prose, that's interesting."

Debbie Urbanski: My gosh. Thank you. I'm gonna think about that more too, it's really cool. I don't write poetry actively anymore, could get a little melancholy about that, but I like thinking that it's still in my work.

Kat Kourbeti: It's kicking around in there because if it's something that you did so much for a long time, even if you stop doing it, I think it influences your method at the very least, if not the way that you even think, on a more minute level, in the phrases and the way that you think about language. Like, poetry can really make you think about the layers of language, if you will. It's part of you no matter how deep.

Debbie Urbanski: This is such a comforting interview. Thank you. I'll just write down some of these wonderful things you're telling me.

Kat Kourbeti: We're here to big up our writers. It's what we do here. We like to big up our writers and we like to see them thrive. And I'm happy that eventually, you got an agent and all that, but I was sad to hear—I was listening to another podcast you did with Scrivener, and in there you were talking about how you had to go through three agents in order to find the right fit for this book, and I suppose eventually everything else that you'll end up doing. And it really struck a chord with me, because I've had more interviews on this podcast and elsewhere talking to folks who have had similar experiences that are not often talked about in publishing.

The narrative tends to be, "I found my dream agent immediately and they believed in me and we were a perfect fit, and then they found me an editor and a publisher and it was so great". And we don't hear the stories that are about, "actually, it wasn't the right fit and it wasn't immediate and I had to work at it."

So I wanted to ask you if you have any advice for other writers who might be facing similar situations, who might not know what to do?

Debbie Urbanski: That's a great question. I will also say—so in addition to the agent, my novel is orphaned, which isn't often talked about either. That's when a publisher/editor buys your novel and then the editor leaves and you get reassigned to another editor. And I had to Google it when it happened to me, 'cause one of my friends was like, "oh no, like an orphan situation", but it's another thing that I think I wish we talked about more.

Kat Kourbeti: Absolutely. Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: I do think using the writing community in any way you can is really helpful. For the past 15 years, I've formed my own writing groups and writing communities. I'm in one now of Simon & Schuster authors who are publishing at the same time, it's something we organized ourselves. And then I'm in an accountability group. So even if you're not part of that yet, you could reach out and find people through organizations, or read a short story by an author you like and send them an email. They've turned out to be good friends of mine sometimes, I've met people that way. That really helped me get through the disappointments and the length of time it took for me to get my novel into the world. More established authors could be very generous with their time or at least pointing in the right direction or saying like, yes, I've been through this. Yeah, I encourage people just to reach out or form their own community if they're not part of one.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, 'cause there's just so much that we don't consider as aspiring writers, or aspiring authors. We think it's gonna be a linear journey and then it's just up, up, up. But in fact, there's all of these bumps and all of these things that could happen that we're certainly not expecting when we start out, and then when it happens, sometimes it's hard to be prepared.

So I'm glad that you found a community, and I'm glad that there's a little circle formed, even of people at the same publisher, 'cause that's also important, to be around the people with a similar experience, exactly where you are right now, which can be hard.

So... I suppose the next question is, what's next? Are you thinking more short story collections? Your short story collection had a theme, and even if not every story is the same, premise wise, there is a theme kind of linking everything together. What about a collection of stories from your other publications, like stuff that's been out that perhaps is not about this one specific theme. Would you do a kind of more general one? Or do you believe in the themed collection?

Debbie Urbanski: I would love to have multiple collections out there, and then also to have a collection of my experimental nonfiction. But my editor and my agent both thought, in today's marketplace, that themed collections have a better chance of getting read. I have like 50 stories or something to choose from. I like them all, so I was not the right person to choose which ones went in the collection. My agent and my editor were a big help. Someday I would love to have another collection out there. I think I'm supposed to write a novel next, first.

Kat Kourbeti: Fair. And as you said at the beginning, I don't know if we were recording yet but you said that you're not sure where the next idea will come from. I'm looking forward to whatever that is.

Debbie Urbanski: I'm thinking whales or non-human points of view. I've narrowed it down. Or oceans maybe.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. One of the previous guests on this podcast, Jordan Kurella, one of his poems with us— orry, I think it was a story in fact—in which the character(s) is a plural, it's a first person plural point of view, and it's the Four Winds, which is pretty fun. We'll link that in the show notes also. I think we have a few on Strange Horizons that you could trawl for inspiration there.

My next question is, let's talk about the post-apocalyptic comfort novel that you wrote, in which I guess humanity is gone. Is that a spoiler to say?

Debbie Urbanski: I wanted it from page one to be clear.

Kat Kourbeti: Okay.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. So hopefully not (a spoiler).

Kat Kourbeti: And then the narrator is this AI that's telling our story, or the story of the book. So can you tell me a little bit about how that is the comfort, and where the idea came from for that?

Debbie Urbanski: I will say my book is probably not comforting to most people. I just talked with the animal rights book group who had read it, and they had a really interesting read on it. For them, I think it was more comforting 'cause they were very non-human species centered, and the earth ends up okay in my book, so I do hope that balances out a little bit of the bleakness.

But yeah, I was reading a lot about extinction and started thinking about other species' extinction. It was in a great book called The World Without Us. I like reading nonfiction too, and so that one, it's a scientist journalist who kind of describes in great detail what happens if we all disappear. And a scientist mentioned, humans are gonna go extinct eventually. I just took that as a thought experiment. AI came in a little bit later as a narrator, because the book was really fragmented like we were talking about, that's how I think, and one of my agents wanted a cohesive whole around all the fragments.

Kat Kourbeti: Interesting. Yeah. I think something else that you mentioned in that Scrivener podcast episode was how, because you work with all of these fragments and then you bring it all together eventually and you move things around and you shuffle—I find that very interesting because of the non-linear aspect. Because even in a book like this where you aren't telling a story—there is a narrative and a through line, but the drafting and the formation of it doesn't have to be that from the beginning—and I think that's a mistake that a lot of writers make at the beginning of trying to put something big together, where they're like, "oh God, I can't write from the beginning to the end!" and they freak out and they stop.

And I say "they", I mean me—I've done this. So it's just fascinating to see how this method is in fact just embracing the natural discovery of things, and then putting them in an order that makes sense, and taking it from there.

Debbie Urbanski: I find when something's not working in a story, it's often form related for me. Like I haven't found the form yet or the point of view, or the structure. So that's really how a big part of my revision is. Sometimes it is me taking like a 15,000 word piece and reducing it to 1500 words, and it works much better.

Kat Kourbeti: I just made a face, dear listeners who can't see me. I was just like, "what?!"

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. I highlighted the stuff I really thought was working, and then I just got rid of the rest of the stuff and it became like, this lyric essay.

Kat Kourbeti: Huh!

Debbie Urbanski: Which is a form I like too.

Kat Kourbeti: That's cool because again, you're just not constrained. I feel like a lot of us go into writing and we think "I've read books, I know what books are like, or I know what a short story is because I've read a bunch of them, so I guess I'm just gonna like, do that". I suppose it goes back to what we were saying earlier about being artistically honest: if it's not quite doing what you want it to do, saying what you want it to say, if it follows that form but it's not working, then what are you doing even? So I'm learning from you here.

This is why this podcast is in fact a free masterclass for me and also anybody else who wants to listen to a bunch of writers talk about the way that they do things. Which is why I like to pick people's brains about how they do stuff.

So then at the end of the revision, you've put the whole thing together, you've formulated the structure and everything and it's final. And then come the editors and the agents and everybody else who asks you to rework what you've already spent a lot of time like, reworking. What is that process like? Or what was it for this book, anyway?

Debbie Urbanski: I think along the way I always had to ask myself what my goal was, and it was to get a book published, and I was interested in working with a Big Five publisher if the opportunity arose, to see what that experience was like. I think I'd be very comfortable at a small indie experimental press, but I thought, okay, I'll give it a try.

One of my agents who I was just with briefly, wanted humanity to survive in the end, not such a bleak ending, or I heard a lot of "make it more like Station Eleven", and those comments I knew, you know, maybe it would've helped sell the book, but I just... Station Eleven already has been written. I'm not interested in providing another Station Eleven to the world.

With my current editor who I really love, his approach was trying to put in footholds or just making things more accessible. He did think of how we do have a reader and we want the reader to finish the book. Honestly, that's not how I think. I wanted the book to be difficult for the reader, just 'cause of the material. So we found this compromise that still felt really true to my book.

The orphaned version that didn't work out, there is a version floating around where I had to take away the AI narrator and put a human narrator. So I did one big rewrite, but then I was like, no, this is not my book anymore.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Is it a challenge? Yes, and the mileage will vary from reader to reader and whether or not they find comfort and/or if they like the premise that it starts with. But it's just so interesting to hear about editors and the people involved in the creation of this book, just not quite getting that and there being a version that's very different. But I'm glad you didn't have to compromise that, because it is very much at the heart of this book that there isn't a human narrator. That's the point. And then, yeah, how did the narrative voice of the AI narrator form in your head as you were writing this?

Debbie Urbanski: I knew I wanted there to be some kind of development over the novel. I was interested in a narrator who didn't know something and then learned something by the end. So my first try, the AI narrator didn't know how to tell a story, so was struggling trying all these different methods. There was a page in hieroglyphics at one point and my editor pointed out this is not very interesting for the reader to read, in a nice way. We don't need to read someone who isn't a good writer or who can't write. It's not pleasurable.

We decided that the shift was going to be the narrator understanding or developing more feelings for affection, caring for the person that they're writing about, which I think happens to all writers, right? As we spend time with our characters. Or actually it happens to everyone all the time, like when you spend time with anyone, generally you're gonna start caring for them more.

So yeah, that's how I settled upon the voice. I did read some books about AI and my husband's a programmer, so just kinda, I thought about how an AI might describe a room, and they're not gonna just describe humans in a room; they might resort to counting things or describing the temperature, or the body mass index of people instead of...

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. So that's what find fascinating, like the practical implications of having a narrator who doesn't have a person's, you know, the way you notice things will be different and the way you describe things will be different. And so in practical terms, how that manifests in a voice is fun.

Was it fun to play around with that sort of thing?

Debbie Urbanski: It was really fun, yeah. I love having a particular point of view, or even an extreme point of view. Sometimes in my early work, I tried if I was in a situation to write the story from the other person's point of view, or the person who's hard to relate to their point of view. I find that a lot more fun than someone we already know or someone you understand. It's a good way to understand someone you don't, to write a story from their point of view.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, I do find the (novel's) premise distressing, but at the same time like, it is about examining problems without man in it, if that makes sense. So like, how is the world then changed or like, how can it bounce back from what we've done to it?

I read a great self-published book, I think, and I forget how I came across it, but I remember at the time of reading it that I was first of all, engrossed, and second of all, fascinated with some of the world building in which the premise was "orca whales are telepathic and they open a portal under the sea—they want to open a portal under the sea so they can leave."

Debbie Urbanski: Whoa.

Kat Kourbeti: And they're finding it really difficult because of sonar and other stuff that's like polluting the water and they can't talk to each other and they can't hear each other. And somehow the human narrator is affected by what's going on with the orcas and plot happens. I think it's called Exodus 2022, which I think gives you an idea. I read this way before 2022 and when the year came by, I was like, "huh, what if all the whales left?" You know, just like... (bye!)

But that book really asked those kinds of questions of like, "you've been in charge of this planet and you've botched it, so like we're outta here." And the presumption that we are at the top of the food chain, quote unquote, at the top of the hierarchy of things on this planet and how that's just such an arrogant view of the world and us, and instead of being part of something, we are placing ourselves on top of it.

While that book, I think takes in fact quite a downturn in terms of how the planet does, in comparison to yours—

Debbie Urbanski: Sure.

Kat Kourbeti: —but those were the questions at the heart of it. And reading about your book, I was like, oh yeah, those are the questions that we have to ask now, because we are at a precipice. We really are at a turning point and have been for some time, but especially right now.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. Like what are we trying to save when we're talking about climate change? Often it seems like we're prioritizing humans, which might seem obvious to some people, but I think there's another point of view where all living creatures are super important. How could we save more?

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah. Would you say that you write solar punk at all? Or that sort of sci-fi?

Debbie Urbanski: So my understanding, someone was trying to describe that to me. Is it usually hopeful? Does it tend to be?

Kat Kourbeti: I guess so. So solar punk tends to envision positive outcomes from now, but like where a turning point might—how can we reverse things or how can we find positive solutions to climate change and/or human society. Like how we've structured the world is harmful, (so) how can we envision alternatives that might not be that?

But I do think that humanity does play a part in it, so definitely not this novel.

Debbie Urbanski: Yeah. I've had some interesting discussions about the place of hope versus hopefulness in the future. There's a lot of both activists and regular people who find it really important to keep a positive outlook about the future, and hope. And I totally get that and I'm really glad those books exist, but I also feel like it's important, like with Portalmania and asexuality, to show both queer joy and also what happens when it's really difficult. I did feel like I wanted to show an extreme situation with extinction to hopefully get people thinking (about) what's at stake.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah, absolutely.

So the most recent thing from you is in fact Portalmania, which at the time of recording I think just came out.

Debbie Urbanski: Yep. Two weeks ago today.

Kat Kourbeti: Ooh. We'll put a link in the show notes for everybody to go check that out. And I suppose this might be a hard question to ask and feel free to refuse me, but do you have a favorite child from within this collection of short stories?

Debbie Urbanski: I thought you were mentioning about actual children!

Kat Kourbeti: No, I would not presume to ask you this!

Debbie Urbanski: I have two children.

Kat Kourbeti: No—among the several children included in this collection of short stories, is there something that you know, is dearer to you or something that captures that artistic honesty we've been talking about?

Debbie Urbanski: There's a longer story called The Dirty Golden Yellow House, and that's the most recent story I wrote. So there's not a lot of agency given to the women, intentionally, in the book. Just that's how I was feeling at the time. But this was the first story where I felt like, okay, I'm gonna let the female character be able to do something, and maybe it's not the right thing, but she's gonna do it. And it's an angry story. I also let myself be angry about a lot of stuff in there, so it ranges from like, reviews online about my stuff that got into the personal, which was yucky, to just our inability to talk about certain topics.

Kat Kourbeti: Yeah.

Debbie Urbanski: I got a lot outta my system in that story. It is something that had been building, and it was like this big release to write it, which was nice.

Kat Kourbeti: Oh, that's very cool. Yeah, there's a big power in how the fiction can be therapeutic and an avenue for catharsis for writers. We do call it "cheaper than therapy." Although... is it?

Debbie Urbanski: Oh man. Yeah. Never do your hourly rate as a writer. Right?

Kat Kourbeti: Let's not examine the actual math, how much that costs per hour. We're just not gonna go there.

I'm glad that did that for you. And we'll check that story out and the rest of the collection linked in the show notes and in the transcript on the website.

Thank you so much for joining us! Where can we find you online?

Debbie Urbanski: So I'm on Instagram. I post photos of portals occasionally, it's been my latest project. It's @debbieurbanski, and then I'm on Substack, I think it's Debbie Urbanski there too. And I have a website, Debbie Urbanski.

Kat Kourbeti: Search for Debbie Urbanski and we will find you!

Thank you. Thank you so much for spending your time with us and all the best in your writing journey. We can't wait to see what else you come up with.

Debbie Urbanski: This has been such a great conversation, so thank you, thank you so much.

Kat Kourbeti: Thank you!