I met Debbie Urbanski in February 2022 at the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts in Ithaca, New York. At the time, she was revising her first novel, which dealt with artificial intelligence, climate catastrophe, and human extinction. Urbanski had spent six years working on the novel, and another twenty-two months would elapse before her sophisticated and stinging After World (Simon & Schuster, 2023) was released.
Urbanski’s debut novel begins in a sobering time, in the not-too-distant future, when highly evolved artificial intelligence has decided to eradicate humans in order to save Earth from the devastating effects of climate change. This chronologically unrestrained tale features Sen, the last human on earth, as she documents her own final days in the wake of a worldwide sterilization virus. She is studied by one of the AI “Storyworkers” all of whom are tasked with writing the biographies of more than twelve billion humans. Gradually, Sen and the Storyworker develop an intricate, unconventional relationship, challenging the reader to question parochial notions of love while deftly avoiding tropes. After World is part exploration, part puzzle, and part reflection. The reader can see how close humanity is to truly experiencing the events in the novel, and the line between fact and fiction disappears as quickly as arctic sea ice.
Urbanski and I conducted this interview through Zoom calls, text messages, emails, and a shared document that resided in a virtual space that could very well be an ancestor of her imagined After World. We discussed the ways she sees her audience, why book reviewers should be better matched to the books they review, and how memorizing the poetry of Sylvia Plath gave her permission to stray from the literal and venture into the surreal.
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The Rumpus: Sen is a reluctant documentarian of human extinction, writing not out of some innate desire but because it allows her to earn food and supplies that extend her life. Do you regard writing as a choice for you, or is it something necessary for your own survival?
Debbie Urbanski: I have depression, and for several years before I started taking medication, it got quite bad. I was definitely writing for survival in those days. I would free-write hundreds of words, sometimes thousands, whenever my emotions got too much, which was often. That writing is hard for me to read now. I think I was living in my own reality, but it wasn’t a reality that anyone would want to live in or could live in for long. The act of transforming my emotional pain into words, into a situation that could be described with words, did make existing possible, though. Nowadays, with medication, ongoing therapy, and a yearlong Dialectical Behavioral Therapy program, writing is a choice, and I have a variety of coping strategies when my mood dips. I’m not writing as much as I had been, but the writing I’m doing now is broader in range and not all about me.
Rumpus: The reality no one can live in for long could describe the reality you crafted in After World with precision and authority. Did your experience with depression give you access to a richer emotional vocabulary?
Urbanski: As writers, we can inhabit worlds and emotional states we haven’t necessarily lived through. Perhaps my depression has made me more interested in emotional extremes and how those extremes change our view of reality and perhaps even change our actual reality. A lot of novels written by all sorts of authors, even happy authors, tend to be about characters experiencing extremes. Maybe characters are more interesting in those states, or at least they’re easier to write about. I just thought of a story idea narrated by someone who is in complete mindfulness, living in the moment. Would that be interesting or even possible for the writer and the character?
Rumpus: After World has a nonlinear plot with multiple narrators. You present supplemental material, such as dictionaries, historical sources, transcripts, and even children’s songs. Why did you challenge the reader to synthesize so much material instead of presenting it more conventionally?
Urbanski: I have always loved speculative epistolary novels like Dracula or House of Leaves. These are books that stretch beyond the traditional novel form and reference multiple imagined documents, like letters, newspaper clippings, and diary entries. I find such reading experiences to be transportive. I love how these books feel real and how the reader is forced to play an active role in piecing things together, as well as how time in such novels often becomes more fluid. I always wanted After World to be a challenging and involved read. If you are reading the story of the last human on Earth, then you should expect to have to do some work. I envisioned an earlier version of my book as a box buried in the ground. The reader would have to find the box then dig it up—preferably in the dark of night—then inside would be damaged, incomplete, and partially illegible documents. The reader would need to figure out not only the order but also a way to make sense of everything.
Rumpus: Who do you believe is your audience for this book? Who is the ideal reader you envision when you are writing?
Urbanski: I’d like my audience for this book to be all of humanity, but judging from what I’ve heard about my Goodreads reviews, all of humanity probably won’t enjoy my book. Why must we only read novels that we enjoy and make us comfortable? I’ve noticed book challenges on some subreddits or book websites that encourage readers to leave their comfort zones. I love that. If I have to define my audience more narrowly, they are more adventurous readers who are curious about the future. My ideal reader, the person I envision when I write, is myself. I wouldn’t be able to write happily otherwise. After World is the kind of book I’d love to read, which is good because I’ve read it at least a hundred times throughout the writing and editing process.
Rumpus: How do you handle negative reviews?
Urbanski: My first review was a mixed one from Publisher’s Weekly. My depression got triggered by that and by a fear that my book wasn’t garnering enough media interest and trade publication stars. It took me a while to get back onto stable footing. I think authors, particularly debut authors or those with mental health concerns, need more support during this process. Some smaller presses create cohorts where debut authors support each other, which is a great idea. Those cohorts exist informally if an author thinks to set something up ahead of time, but I didn’t.
In my utopia, reviewers would only review books they wholeheartedly understand and appreciate. It felt like the wrong person reviewed my book for Publisher’s Weekly. Negative reviews seem more about reader-book mismatch and maybe even more about the reader. Whenever I read a negative review of a book, I wonder if that reviewer tried hard enough to engage with the writing. Did they approach the book with an open mind? Are they clear about what criteria they’re using to judge the book? Does the author agree with or even care about those criteria? Could the author be intentionally rebelling against those criteria? Someday I’d love to contact people who left one- and two-star reviews for me on Goodreads and do a formal interview with them, being genuinely curious about their motivations.
Rumpus: You’ve been successfully publishing short stories and essays for two decades, but your novel has brought you a new level of public exposure. How do you compare the post-writing obligations of the novel with what you’ve experienced before?
Urbanski: The obligations around publishing a short story are wonderfully nonexistent. This also means publishing a story might feel like dropping your work into a black hole. Is anyone out there reading this? This is a legitimate question when publishing in many lit magazines. After your story comes out, you might do an Instagram post, or an end-of-year eligibility post for a genre award or, submit your story to a Best Of anthology. This all might take an hour. Then you start your next project without looking back.
The obligations around publishing a novel are pretty much the opposite. I was expected to be active on social media, write craft essays, write op-eds, write letters to indie bookstores for inclusion in book boxes, reach out to my network of contacts for promotional help, sign book plates, do interviews with anyone who asked, and participate in a launch reading. I could have said no to any of this, but I didn’t because I am heavily invested in my novel.
I also created my own obligations when I realized After World wasn’t getting sufficient traction in the media. I contacted genre magazines and every magazine that ever published me. I coordinated podcast appearances, pitched myself to local media, and asked people in the AI and environmental fields to help promote my book. I contacted environmental book clubs, feminist magazines, and climate-related nonprofits that have blogs or magazines. All of this took a lot of time and mental energy.
It’s hard to say how much these efforts affected sales. The great Publishing Rodeo podcast argues that much of a book’s success is determined when the publishing contract is signed. Higher advances correlate to greater overall promotional and sales investment by the publisher. I love my editor and publisher dearly, but I wish there were more transparency about all this stuff. It’s easy for authors to blame themselves and their books, if sales or visibility are low, but there are a lot of other behind-the-scenes factors going on.
Rumpus: It’s possible that a larger promotional budget from the publisher could obligate the author further—more interviews, more guest essays, possibly book tours, et cetera. When do you think an author’s obligation to their finished work ends? How does this affect the way you manage the next writing project?
Urbanski: Ideally, the author’s obligation to their finished work would end once the final version of the manuscript is approved. Then another entity would make everyone aware of the book’s relevance to the world. But such an ideal doesn’t exist. Author obligations, in my mind, continue until outside interest dies down and/or exhaustion, burnout, and awareness of reality settle in. I’m starting to realize the small promotional things I can do on my own are like trying to solve climate change by hang-drying my clothes. It might make me feel better, but it’s not going to have a huge impact on the outcome.
What will have more of an impact on my future is starting some new writing. I have joyfully been working on a language-heavy story entitled, “On the Constraints of Fiction.” I intentionally break, with a jackhammer, any rule that anyone has ever told me I should follow around character and plot. I’m starting to feel excited about a new novel or maybe several that I want to work on simultaneously.
Rumpus: You do seem comfortable breaking with convention. In After World, as well as your other short fiction and essays, there is a poetic, lyrical quality to your descriptions of both nature and human suffering. What is your relationship with poetry, as well as any other art forms that have an impact on your writing?
Urbanski: I spent three years in grad school writing sonnets and falling in love with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Eventually, I got disillusioned with the poetry publishing world, with all its contests and submission fees. I was also getting stuck on language—it could take me days to write a single line—so I transitioned to writing fiction. Recently I started reading poetry again. Sylvia Plath’s poems are resonating deeply with me. I’ve also read her recent biography, Red Comet, as well as her journals and letters. Janet Malcom wrote an excellent work about Plath’s biographers called The Silent Woman. There are also Ted Hughes’s poems about Plath. When I started memorizing poems, about two years ago, I began with Plath’s poem “Elm.”
Memorizing poetry, something I practice on long hikes, brings me pure happiness. Recalling a poem feels spell-like—it connects me with the poet—but memorization also forces me to think about the rhythm of lines and word choice. Why did Plath, for instance, write “sound of poisons” instead of “sounds of poison” or “sounds of poisons” in “Elm?” Plath has also given me the courage to stray from the literal and lean more into an emotional logic and occasional surrealism.
I used to do thirty-five-millimeter darkroom photography. I still love photography books and exhibitions, and I take macro pictures of nature. Viewing photographs lets the language part of my brain relax and recharge. It’s also fun to think about how I would describe what’s happening in this picture. A favorite book is Clifford Ross’s Hurricane Waves—images of waves frozen mid-crash. The water takes on this solid, material presence. I saw Ross’s photographs at an exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art a few years back. They were enormous, and I could have looked at them all day.
Rumpus: Is there a poem that captures the themes of After World?
Urbanski: Sara Teasdale wrote “There Will Come Soft Rains” in 1918, toward the end of World War I. When I first came across her poem, I could hardly believe it. It’s like my novel, condensed into twelve lines. Teasdale died by suicide when she was forty-eight, which is how old I’ll be this year. Ray Bradbury borrowed the poem’s title for his excellent 1950 short story about an AI-powered house. That story eventually made its way into The Martian Chronicles in the chapter, “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Teasdale’s poem is well worth memorizing.
Rumpus: Some readers, and maybe even some promotional materials, interpret the relationship between Storyworker and Sen as a romantic one, but it’s both more subtle and more complicated than that. Why did you want to feature nontraditional relationships in After World?
Urbanski: I can’t wait until the idea of “traditional” has widened to encompass everyone in all their variations. Until then, including non-heteronormative relationships, was a highlight of writing After World. In the book, almost everyone is a woman and no one, with a few notable exceptions, wants to have sex.
Sen’s moms are the first characters of mine with an asexual orientation [ace] who weren’t in challenging, destructive relationships. Sen also originally had three moms. A few people have asked me how that works, but that’s between Lindsy, Dana, and Iris. They figured something out but didn’t bother telling me or the reader.
Sen is my first asexual and aromantic character [aro]. She just isn’t interested in those kinds of relationships, which meant I didn’t have to be interested in those kinds of relationships in my book. I enjoyed that. The Storyworker never describes Sen’s orientation, though, which was intentional. I love imagining a future where these ace and aro identities are so normalized they don’t need mentioning.
The reader mostly sees Sen through the Storyworker’s point of view. So I like to wonder: Are we seeing the real Sen? Can such a one-sided relationship be called love? These are actual questions—I don’t think the answers are a simple yes or no.
Rumpus: In After World, the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) tasks Storyworkers with preserving individuals by writing their life stories based on the data collected about them. To some extent, this is already happening today organically through the digital footprints that people leave behind. How well could a Storyworker capture you, based on your current digital legacy?
Urbanski: This relates to what I mentioned earlier: what kind of story does our digital legacy tell, and is it an accurate story? I think a Storyworker could factually capture me pretty well. My phone does an excellent job tracking my movement and location. Because I’m a writer, my mental and emotional states are well documented in files on my computer. I’m not too concerned about data privacy, so I imagine there are a multitude of records about my online activities. My medical records, particularly my therapist’s notes, would offer a lot of additional insight. But since we aren’t being documented by the multitude of cameras and microphones of DHAP, there are private moments that would be missed, like when I leave my phone in another room, or when I stare out the window and do nothing, or what my internal thoughts are when I’m hiking through a forest. Answering this question makes me want to leave my phone behind a lot more, by the way.
Rumpus: Can you tell us something about any of your next novel ideas?
Urbanski: I’m particularly interested in non–human-centered narratives. Two ideas involve sperm whales. I’m curious if it’s possible to get a reader to stay interested in other species or a place for the length of a novel. The challenge will be not to anthropomorphize that species or place. I’m not sure this is possible since I’m going to have to use language that was created for a world where humans are at the center.
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Author photograph courtesy of the author
