On Stories and Portals with Debbie Urbanski

A Q&A with the author of "Portalmania"

May 27, 2025

Short story collections never get the love they deserve, which is why I’m happy to be able to offer this Q&A with Debbie Urbanski on the occasion of the release of her collection of stories Portalmania, a book filled with strange, haunting, poignant tales.

We chatted back and forth in a shared document over the course of a few days.

Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel After World (S&S, 2023) -- which was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, the Los Angeles Times tech, Booklist, and Strange Horizons -- and the story collection Portalmania (S&S, May 2025). Over the past two decades, she's published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Strange Horizons, F&SF, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. Find her online on Instagram @debbieurbanski or on Substack.

John Warner: What’s the first short story you remember writing? Do you recall anything about the experience, if it felt particularly interesting or compelling?

Debbie Urbanski: Somehow I still have a copy of that early story from the 1980s. I remember my dad and I had sat down with an electric typewriter in the kitchen, I was second grade at the time, and we began taking turns typing in sentences. My dad is a huge Twilight Zone/old sci-fi movie sort of guy, so the story has that vibe – it’s about a laboratory experiment gone wrong and ends with the narrator getting turned into a monster and murdering his assistant named Bill. I remember being in awe at my father's use of language (“Were our experiments becoming so grotesque that the disfigurement of God’s creatures was part of the plan?” is one of my favorite lines) – and also how, together, we were somehow creating this additional reality. I remember being excited about not knowing what was going to happen next. Perhaps that was the first clue that I would never be the sort of writer to work off an outline or to know where a story was going.

JW: I asked that question because I think it’s interesting to see where that initial storytelling impulse comes from. There’s all kinds of research suggesting humans are “wired” for narrative, but crossing over to create them is a different thing. The creation of an alternate reality is central to your novel and your story collection. In my case, I recall a story I wrote for Mrs. Thompson in 8th grade about a family called The Bagelsons who were just sentient Bagels, and I was motivated entirely by the desire to do a visual joke where the daughter, Jenny Bagelson was cut from the girl’s soccer team because she wanted to be a goalie, but the ball kept passing right through her. Mrs. Thompson said she’s “never read anything like it.” I took it as praise, but who knows what she was really thinking? Still, it became a goal to strive for. How did your own motives for writing develop over time? What’s the impulse and then what helps sustain that impulse?

DU: A story about a family called the Bagelsons who are actually bagels would still make an awesome children’s book, you know. (Or a story for adults? Why not. I’d want to read it). And I think creating something that’s unlike anything a reader has read before remains an admirable goal. I originally started writing because I loved reading so much – and something about the act of writing made me feel important in this necessary way, like even if I was this shy and introverted kid, I still had a voice. That kept me going for a while, to just want to participate in the creation of stories. Later I noticed this disconnect from how I experienced the world (and relationships and love and eventually motherhood) versus how the world and these roles were portrayed in the public eye and in books. So I wrote to challenge the ideas of normalcy that have felt so constraining and damaging to me over the years. I became interested as well in challenging the boundaries of genre: for instance, could I write an ultra realistic post-apocalpytic novel that portrayed the suffering that surely must be part of living in a post-apocalyptic world? (That became my novel After World). More recently, I’ve wanted to challenge what a story might look like. My life has felt so different from the neatness of the story form, and I wanted to see if I could write something that reflected more truthfully how my life felt.

I’m at a weird spot right now – I’ve written all the Portalmania stories, I finished a recent series of experimental essays, I finished my novel – so now what? I wondered briefly if I wanted to create something more commercial, something I thought my editor or agent or even readers would like. But in the last few months, I decided that wasn’t worth my time. There’s so much reader-friendly fiction and writing out there. The world doesn’t need more of that. I want to write something unlike what I’ve written before – that’s what is keeping me going right now.

JW: Your new collection, Portalmania, is themed around the notion of, well…portals, gateways elsewhere. In some stories, like the opening “The Promise of a Portal,” the portals are literal. In others they’re more metaphorical. How did this theme develop as you worked on the book? Was it intentional for the outset, or something that you noticed after you’d written some of the individual pieces.

DU: I’ve been into portal stories ever since I was a kid. I really loved the idea of getting out of this world and into another world where I’d feel more comfortable. But in the last ten or 15 years, I’ve had this need to challenge genre conventions, even if it's a genre I love. I did this for my novel After World (with the post-apocalyptic genre), and I remember wanting to do it with portal stories. I was irritated at the time with how portal stories generally align with the idea of the chosen one, where the stories follow the children or adults who go through portals and ignore the majority of humanity that’s left behind. I was interested in seeing who was left behind. At some point, I had a list of maybe 15 more formal portal stories I wanted to write, all variations: what if mother went through a portal but the story was told from the child who is left behind? What if a woman found her portal world as an adult but it was too late and the land was empty? What if the mom had gone through a portal but came back and then her child wants to go through that same portal? What if the mom stays behind and her go? What if a multitude of portals appear but the narrator can’t go through any of them? And so on. Eventually I wrote three of them and that felt like enough. It was really when I was working with my agent and my editor in selecting which stories to include that we decided to expand the idea of portals to include the metaphorical type– like the large life choices we make that can send our lives into a whole new direction.

JW:

Lincoln Michel

had a recent newsletter about the “genre bending age” of literary writers deploying genre tropes that are quite faithful to the original genre, but which also comfortably exist as “literary fiction.” Do you think about this stuff with your writing or are you just doing what you do?

DU: That Lincoln Michel piece is so great (and so true). I was in college in the 1990s and got my MFA in the early 2000s, and genre sure wasn’t considered worth studying or talking about back then in the classroom. I read it anyway–partly because of my dad (see above) but also I loved the stuff–so it felt natural for me to incorporate genre elements in my writing when I started writing fiction seriously. (I may also have a different relationship to reality than some people due to how my brain works and many long years struggling with depression.) What I love about genre bending is that there can be both a lot of play and also a lot of pushing back of conventions. Though I have encountered a few challenges with this kind of in-between writing. One is that bookstores don’t have the right kind of shelves. They separate out literature from sci-fi and keep fantasy separate from horror – what to do with books that are all of those things? I also think this kind of writing can be trickier to market and may lend itself to more disappointed readers (and reviewers–this just happened to Portalmania actually, where the reviewer expected a straight-forward portal book and that’s not what I write). My books don’t work if a traditional genre lens is applied. I’m curious why this resurgence in genre has been happening. What about realism doesn’t seem to capture our reality anymore? And I wonder what will be the next trend.

JW: It strikes me that stories are, almost by definition, portals themselves, gateways elsewhere, often into something unknown.

DU: I love that interpretation. I think that’s why I loved books as a kid (and still love reading so much). It’s the closest I can get to a portal. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about different forms of narrative – do we experience or process stories in books differently from, say, how we experience stories in a computer game or a TV series? And what are we losing as we, as a society, seem to be shifting away from books and towards these other forms of narrative? I haven’t figured this all out yet, but I do think having our brain create, as readers, entire worlds out of words is special. (Though the interactive nature of video games, where the player gets to participate in the narrative, does intrigue me.)

JW: Your 2023 novel, After World, which involves humans asking artificial intelligence to help solve the climate crisis (sidenote: the solution is not what humans were hoping for) was published only a year after ChatGPT was introduced to the public, and knowing the time it takes to write, sell, and publish a novel means you were thinking about AI long before it had such a present in our day-to-day conscoiusness. What led you to be tapped into this stuff in advance of the zeitgeist?

DU: Originally After World was an intentionally-fragmented story about extinction but, perhaps wisely, my first agent thought my novel needed a cohesive narrator. And since all of humanity is dead from page one of my book, the narrator needed to be non-human (a ghost? an alien?). Eventually we settled on making the narrator an AI. That was in 2019, when even though large language models (LLMs) weren’t available to the general public, the idea of them was definitely in the air if you were a person that enjoyed reading science, or science fiction, or happened to be married to a computer programmer (like I am). Once my novel got bought, I was able to apply for early access to GPT3, a precursor of Chat GPT and play around with it. I know there is a lot of justified anger toward LLMs from the writing community–but I will say the first time I interacted with GPT3, it was thrilling. This was during COVID, my family and I were gathered around my laptop in a mostly empty hiking lodge for spring break, it might as well have been the apocalypse, and there we were, conversing with this entity that was trying very hard to be human. It was so sci-fi.

JW: It’s is hard to overstate how uncanny those first experiences with a large language model can be because it doesn’t seem possible and it is sort of thrilling. I have to say, for me, the thrill wore off as I experimented with it as I wrote my book because I couldn’t find a genuine use for it as part of my writing process, but as technology it is a kind of marvel. Do you use it in any part of your writing process?

DU: I do use large language models occasionally as a grammar check, especially during the copy editing process – kind of how I would use Google. Or if I’m using a word that I’m not entirely comfortable with (I like dictionaries, especially old ones a lot), I might ask - what’s the meaning of this word in my sentence? Though I’ve also found myself going back more to my print version of Roget’s Thesaurus or even my big old Webster’s New International Dictionary Second Edition that is next to my desk. There’s something soothing in the analog right now.

JW: And finally, my capper for everyone. What’s one book you recommend people read that you think not enough people know about?

DU: I’m going to go with Steven Millhauser’s first novel Edwin Mullhouse, which he published at the age of 29 in 1972. I know of Millhauser through his fabulous short stories, though I had honestly never heard of this particular novel until recently when a friend of mine brought it up and insisted I read it. As far as I know, my friend and I are the only two people who have read this book, and that has to change. Partly because I want (and need) to talk about the ending with other people, but also – wow. The language is so gorgeous yet so understated, and the book manages to be funny, joyful, nostalgic, and heartbreaking all at the same time. (It also serves as a beautiful farewell to the unplugged kind of childhood that’s pretty much impossible to experience today.) This novel reminded me why I love writing and reading so much and I hope to reread it every few years.

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