Debbie Urbanski doesn’t want to be interviewed. That’s the first thing I notice when we ask Google to record and transcribe our conversation on a Wednesday afternoon in March.
After the release of her first book, After World — a novel she began working on during the Obama administration, but did not release until after Covid, a novel which is presciently about a virus that wipes out humanity, about AI taking the place of people, and about the impotent human need to try to control things they cannot — she has become something of a go-to commentator in the ongoing conversation around Large Language Models in the arts. I want to get her most recent takes, but she doesn’t make it easy. I also want to get her to talk about artificial intelligence, the state of literature, and her new collection Portalmania (Simon & Schuster, 2025), but she is evasive. She’d rather talk about ghosts, Prozac, and anything but her fiction.
The thing about Debbie is that she has never been one to be mysterious. She always says too much, is always transparent. Perhaps she knows this about herself.
“It’s really hard for me to lie or simplify,” she explains matter-of-factly at one point during the interview. Perhaps this interview is her attempt to overload the signal?
We talked for a couple hours, and I ended up texting/ emailing her about clarifications a few times. Just like with everything else, she has a surprisingly nuanced and sometimes against-the-grain take on all these fraught topics. I was looking forward to getting into them, but unsurprisingly, my interview of her begins with her asking me questions…
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Debbie Urbanski: Did you look at the open AI story… in the Guardian?
Matthew Thomas Meade: I did read that. Yeah, I read that.
DU: What did you think of it?
MTM: I was going to ask you about that. What did you think?
DU: You first. (Laughs triumphantly)
MTM: (Shakes head, bested) So, I found it to be a very interesting experience. First of all, there’s no title. There’s no by line and it just says, “Sam Altman and Jeanette Winterson like this. Don’t you want to be cool like them?” So, I have my guard up; especially because it’s a metafictional story that literally is talking about the frame the whole time. My frame is: I don’t trust Sam Altman and I’ve never read Jeanette Winterson and that colors it a certain way. It’s like someone is putting their fingerprints on it on purpose. Is this actually written by an AI? I don’t know. And then that kicks up all these thoughts of the stuff I want to talk about today. What is a large language model story? What is a short story? What do we care about? What is the experience of it?
It asked me a bunch of interesting questions. I’m not sure if they were the intended questions. I don’t know what the intended questions were. What do you think the story was trying to do? Do you trust it on its face that it was created whole cloth by a large language model?
DU: I think that’s a great framework. It seems like people’s responses have usually been judgement: “It’s good.” “It’s not good,” “It’s as good as a human,” “It’s not…” So, I like the complexity of your response.
I know that OpenAI was looking for creative writers to train a model. I’m pretty sure this is what came out of that. To me, the voice sounds like a young writer, which makes sense because I imagine it was probably young writers training the model. The story did make me want to cry a little bit and not necessarily in a good or bad way. More like, “so this is where we’re going.”
MTM: I think it’s interesting you said that it seems like a young writer. What do you mean by that? What was young about it?
DU: With the writers I like who tend to be older–there’s a uniqueness in voice which makes me feel like nobody else could have written this. That story in The Guardian, on the other hand, felt like an imitation stylistically. I did think the subject matter was interesting though because it was metafictional from an AI’s point of view.
MTM: I just want to clarify, you were crying for different reasons than Jeanette Winterson. Like, “that’s it. this is the end…” as opposed to “the marigolds are so profound to me.”
DU: It felt annihilistic in some way like okay we built the bomb, now we’re gonna set it off. Though another part of me is thinking, “This is a big experiment, let’s see where it goes.”
I think a legit question is “what is the goal here?” Do people even want to read static stories anymore? Don’t they just want to play video games and watch TV? I guess it shows an interest in the story–the fact that these Open AI guys are caring enough about literature to try and have an AI create literature.
MTM: I’m very curious to see what the impact of large language models will be on video games in the next 5 to 10 years, something that is designed to be interactive. I don’t know what the impact will be on fiction because it is designed to be interactive in a different way. I suspect that you may be right. That it is possible that people will start endlessly customizing prompts where it’s like, “Okay, it’s Mists of Avalon except the main character looks exactly like me, but it takes place in the future…” and sort of you endlessly create this new algorithm. I think that’s possible.
I don’t know if there’s a hunger for that. And that’s what I wanted to ask you about is: What are we doing? So much of what the history of storytelling and of specifically fiction has been built around is this notion that there’s a way to do it and we’re getting closer to perfecting the way to do it. And now we’ve created these robots that are going to just put it together for us.
And is that what we want? Do readers care if there’s someone on the other side?
DU: It’s a good question. One of the godfathers of AI (Yamm LeCun), was talking in an interview about how there’s always going to be a market for handcrafted ceramics. Even though you could get a ceramic bowl cheaper if it’s mass-produced by a machine, this handmade thing that was created using a tradition of hundreds of years still has substantial value. If anything, it has more value now in an era of machines. Suddenly a human writing a story feels quaint almost, or historic in this uncomfortable way.
MTM: There’s something boutique about it.
DU: Yeah. Like fancy wedding invitations. So, you’re going to get the human to write a story on a special occasion and then the rest of the time it’s going to be fine if our stories are written by an AI.
MTM: Is there any difference between the impetus for writing a story this year compared to something that you may have written when you were 17?
DU: When I was 17, I was writing out of some immediate emotional reaction. Versus now where there’s stylistic things I want to try or ideas that I want to explore. Or books or rules I want to write against.
MTM: You just described your writing now as a more intellectual exercise, which I think is interesting. Whereas you described your writing in high school as sort of an immediate emotional reaction or response, right?
DU: I will say that’s probably due to the Prozac I’m on. In the 2010s, in my pre-Prozac days, when I was writing stories — it was all coming from immediate emotional stuff as well.
MTM: How did that change the writing? Do you want to say if there’s stories in Portalmania that you wrote on and not on Prozac?
DU: I should find this out. It might be half?
MTM: It would be funny if it was readily apparent to everyone but you.
DU: That would be my biggest nightmare. That would be my psychiatrist’s biggest nightmare, too. She’s always like, “No, no, You’re still a writer, even though you’re on meds.”
MTM: Not for a value reason, just because the tone would be maybe so drastically different. Or maybe not. Maybe you couldn’t tell one way or the other.
DU: I feel like, for me, antidepressants gave me some distance, so I was able to manipulate the material more. Though sometimes I still worry that I’m not feeling enough to write, especially after a medication change. But if I go back and look, I wrote one of my favorite stories while on Prozac. I think I’m probably feeling enough. I hope.
MTM: I want to ask about the editing process. Some of these stories were published elsewhere. How much leeway from Simon & Schuster did you get? And also, do you have any examples of stories that were published that drive you nuts because you feel there’s something wrong with it that you wish you could change?
DU: I had to do a bit of sentence-level rewriting on one story in particular, the story that opens Portalmania. Apparently, when I originally wrote it, I was going through an awkward writing phase. So, it was tricky to respect what my younger writing self was trying to do while also smoothing over the rougher patches. Part of me wanted to tear it apart and completely rewrite it, but there’s also something to be said for how the story captures me as a writer in 2017.
MTM: How much leeway did they give you to make changes?
DU: I could have changed whatever I wanted to in the stories. Nobody felt wedded to how the stories were originally published in lit mags. My editor, Tim (O’Connell, from Simon & Schuster), made some useful high-level suggestions, including suggesting I write a new ending for one of the stories. Tim also felt like I needed to cut back on the marriage counselors — there used to be marriage counselors in practically every story. That was actually a hard edit to make structurally. And there’s a three-part novella whose parts had been split up and published separately in different places. It felt good to bring them back together again.
MTM: And this is in Portalmania?
DU: Yeah. And two of the three parts of this novella are realistic. I was kind of uncomfortable putting them in because I wondered if readers were going to be bored if there’s not fantasy in every single story. But some of the early reviews have called that piece out (“LK-32-C”) as being a highlight.
MTM: When you’re writing something in the speculative realm, and you are using those genre elements or magical realist elements or whatever you want to call them, what are they for? Why do you have them?
DU: When I was writing the first stories in Portalmania, I was using genre to examine some heavy stuff going on in my life. But by the time I wrote the last story in the collection (“The Dirty Golden Yellow House”), even speculative fiction wasn’t working for me. I didn’t want to play pretend anymore. Fiction felt like a child’s game, and I felt like I had to destroy the story structure itself. So, there are stories in Portalmania where my frustrations with narrative are very clear.
MTM: One of my favorite stories of yours is the story about your aunts that you were forced to publish as fiction (“The Picnic Pavilion,” Granta 158, February 10th 2022).
DU: Yeah, I would call it an essay, but yeah.
MTM: Ghost story.
DU: Ghost essay.
MTM: The fact that you are so insistent that it’s an essay and not a piece of fiction is one of my favorite things about you and your writing.
DU: I have wondered about that whole essay / story thing, and I don’t know if this comes up in your writing either, but I think I might experience reality differently. It’s not like I actually saw my relatives as ghosts … Okay, I did when I came to from a surgery. I was a little woozy and I did feel their presence there. I didn’t see them, also it was during COVID, and I was very alone, so I was like, “Could something please come hang out with me?”
MTM: Was that your only experience with ghosts?
DU: Yeah. I believe in them even though I haven’t seen one. Or I want to believe them and that’s close enough. I always wonder if I’d be scared if I see a ghost. That’s one of the big questions, for whatever reason, of my life. I like to think I would just see this ghost over there and be like, “There’s a ghost. No big deal.” But people usually get freaked out by them. So, would I be freaked out by a ghost?
MTM: You say that like it’s weird to be freaked out.
DU: They’re not going to hurt you. That’s like the rule about ghosts. Generally, they can’t.
MTM: But a poltergeist can touch you.
DU: Yes. But I’m talking about ghosts here.
MTM: Getting back to the large language model stuff and if we can make some overlap between these two parts of the conversation… So, if we are looking at that Guardian piece; is the person who created the prompt enough ownership for it to be theirs? Is writing the prompt authorship?
DU: I think that’s interesting. I wonder…
MTM: Because we’ve always had developmental editors. It’s never been one person. We’ve always had anxiety of influence. Is this just a degree of that or is this something new? Is writing the prompt authorship?
DU: I bet humans would like to say yes, so that we could put our name on it. That somehow seems wrong or incorrect to me, but Sheila Heti in The New Yorker had a conversation with a chatbot that she trained. She turned that conversation into a story (“According to Alice”) and she considers the story to be hers even though the chatbot created a lot of it. I think this is probably something we’ll have to figure out, right?
MTM: I mean, or do we? That’s where I’m kind of getting at. They don’t really have the same level of anxiety in film making since the auteur movement. And you get those conversations about Maxwell Perkins or Gordon Lish or these editors who crafted the thing and it wouldn’t exist without them. So, I guess what I’m just thinking about is: What if it turns into a thing where people want to read your story but customized to themselves? They want to read After World 2.0 which is about them being the last person on earth, the parents in the book being their parents, or it’s just that they wish there was also a unicorn, and they put that in there because they have an endlessly customizable large language model, then it begs the question, are they then the author? And if that is what authorship is now, how does that change the impetus for creating anything? Are we doing it for someone else or are we doing it just for our own edification?
DU: Some of what you’re describing with the large language model reminds me of fanfiction in some ways.
I was reading this essay by Gerald Murnane today because I was thinking about publishing anonymously–and what if we did? The book promotion process would be so much more comfortable because it wouldn’t be the author going around talking, it would just be this book that people would have to address. I feel like it would be a good move, if we could get away from the names of who created the work and just focus on the work.
MTM: That was what Pynchon did. He was so anonymous that he was ubiquitous. There is something seductive about that. But at the same time, it’s like, and that’s what I’m kind of grappling with and asking you to grapple with, is one of the things that makes it a thing, makes it interesting is that it is from you personally.
DU: But how does that benefit anybody? If we break that connection, would we lose anything other than we wouldn’t have to read lots of interviews with authors anymore?
MTM: It just becomes that much more impersonal though.
DU: I guess I do like following authors’ books through their career. So, maybe every author would need a number and then you could follow the number. I could be like, “I really like 23791, so I want to see if they wrote anything.” I don’t know.
MTM: I didn’t know we were going to get this dystopian.
DU: Or is it utopian? That’s the question, right?
MTM: I guess that is the question. We all just get our numbers. It’s a huge bureaucracy. You just write your application, and say, “I’d like to apply for the job of imaginative contemporary speculative fiction writer” and then some robot just scans it and…
DU: Yeah, it makes more sense maybe than the current process.
MTM: Maybe it does.
DU: The promotion process for books, it’s not comfortable. I’m working on a personal essay right now about Portalmania. So, like I say in the essay, I put everything I needed to say in this book. So why am I still talking? I mean, one could say about this interview, too.
Everything I need to say is in the book.
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Debbie Urbanski’s writing focuses on the intersections of horror, fantasy, science fiction, memoir, and/or the planet. Her climate AI novel After World (Simon & Schuster, 2023) was named a best book of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, Strange Horizons, Booklist, and the Los Angeles Times. Her story collection Portalmania is out from Simon & Schuster in May, 2025. In addition, her favorite organisms are Green Wood Cups and Pixie Cup Lichens, her favorite forest is Morgan Hill State Forest, and her favorite hike is the Onondaga Branch of the Finger Lakes Trail. She is eternally grateful to the Department of Environmental Conservation’s forest rangers for not only protecting New York’s natural areas but also for airlifting her from Algonquin Mountain after a hiking accident. You can reach out to her or find more of her work at https://debbieurbanski.com/
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Matt Meade is a parent, misanthrope, and wrestling school dropout who lives in the Chicagoland area. His fiction has appeared in The Sun Magazine, Bourbon Penn, The Saturday Evening Post, and elsewhere. His memoir, Rocketflower, won the C&R Press Summer Tide Pool Chapbook Contest. His collection of short fiction, Strip Mall, was published in 2023 by Tailwinds Press. Some of his work, as well as the one good picture he has of himself, can be found at www.matthewthomasmeade.com. Sometimes he has a mustache.