An Interview With Debbie Urbanski, Author of After World
When I asked Debbie Urbanski what photo she would like me to use of her for the interview, she sent me this one. Unconventional. She told me she had wished it had been the photo for the book jacket. The photo is of Debbie in silhouette, gazing at the stars, the focal point the night sky, the human subject out of focus. I agreed. I felt this picture was a perfect encapsulation of After World, and our conversation. Can you imagine a world where humans aren’t at the center, where, sometimes, the story isn’t about us? Looking back. on it, I wish the publishers had used this photo too.
BC: What is your writing origin story? What led you to be the writer you are today?
DU: I was lucky to have a childhood full of old sci-fi/horror movies and Twilight Zone episodes, compliments of my dad. Alongside that I pretty much read everything I could get my hands on. Back then I didn’t judge books, I just loved them, so War and Peace for instance felt just as wonderful as Issac Asimov or Stephen King. Before I dove deep into fiction writing, I took a 12-year detour to write and study poetry. Mashing all this together pretty much describes me as a writer: someone who deeply loves language (and dictionaries) and who enjoys playing around with genre.
BC: What would you say are some of the defining stories or authors for you, both growing up, and that have stuck with you as an adult?
DU: Alice in Wonderland: my first exposure to a portal story!
All the Oz books (more portal stories!), particularly Ozma of Oz. (I wrote a mini essay about reading Ozma of Oz to my daughter when she was 5.)
Ray Bradbury, particularly The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. I’m amazed at how much I loved these stories as a kid and how much I can still love them. I have vivid, visceral memories of reading “All Summer in a Day,” The Veldt,” and “The Long Rain” when I was a kid.
Lloyd Alexander’s Pyrdian Chronicles: I was happily surprised that these books held up perfectly (unlike the Narnia books, for instance, which I enjoyed as a kid but didn’t enjoy reading as an adult).
Stephen King became important to me in middle school and high school. I read every novel he wrote up until maybe 1991. Recently Pet Cemetary came up in a great non-fiction book I’m reading about hauntings (Ghostland: An American History of Haunted Places by Colin Dickey) - the plot of that still sounds amazing, suffused with grief, so I’m planning on rereading that soon.
(This began a bit of a departure while we discussed our mutual love of Ray Bradbury.)
BC: Ray Bradbury is one of my favorite authors, and Martian Chronicles is one of my favorite books! I have to pick up Martian Chronicles at least once a year to reread some of those stories to just refill the life of me sometimes. He has this way of rhythm in his fiction that almost feels musical sometimes.
DU: I love how universal his stories are - people who don’t necessarily read science fiction know and admire him. The first Ray Bradbury story I read was “The Veldt” in middle school - I hope he’s still taught in schools.
(Thankfully, he is.)
(Our favorite stories of Bradbury: There Will Come Soft Rains, Usher II, The Earth Men, Ylla. Then I shared The Last Night of the World, which fit pretty well with the apocalyptic theme, and Debbie mentioned Kaleidoscope, a mutual favorite.)
Ok, back to our regular scheduled interview.
BC: How do you find your time and experience writing poetry inform your writing in fiction? (Personally I see a lot of After World to be very poetic and lyrical in the prose, but are there other ways too?)
DU: Word choice is very important to me and I think that comes from my time as a poet. That was one of the wonderful things about writing poetry: getting to spend hours on a single line if I wanted. During the writing of After World, there was this uncomfortable tension between wanting to slow down and work on the language of every sentence in my book versus knowing that my book was never going to be finished if I did that. What ended up happening rather organically is certain sentences or phrases rose to the surface in terms of linguistic importance. Those were the places where I let myself slow down and really consider the individual words.
BC:What is your writing process/routine and would you consider yourself more a meticulous plotter or a write-as-it-comes writer?
DU: My writing process consists of me sitting at my desk in my attic and usually trying to make sense of the enormous amount of text I’ve created. This often means printing what I’m working on out, tearing the pages into small sections, and rearranging what I want to keep. It’s a weird inefficient process that I’ve been doing for more than a decade. I’m definitely more of a write-as-it-comes writer. One of the reasons I write is to discover where a story or essay (or book!) is going. I love not knowing the ending of what I’m working on – or even what structure I’ll use. After World became, after a certain point, complicated enough that I did need to make several spreadsheets to keep track of timelines. I also carefully mapped out the area around Sen’s cabin, noting what plants and trees grew where. But all those supporting materials came long after the initial draft.
BC: Where did After World come from, and why did you feel you had to write this story?
DU: I started writing After World back in 2016 because I was both interested in–and horrified by–the amount of species extinctions going on in the world. I was reading a lot of non-fiction at the time about climate change. The idea of human extinction came up in one of those books, this idea that all species eventually go extinct so humans would be no exception. Once I became curious about a humanless world, I wanted to figure out how we could get to that point. I also was curious about poking at anthropocentrism. What if our main priority for the future became maintaining as many other species as possible? What if humans were seen as just one species among millions of species? It often surprises me that, when we talk about solutions or mitigations to climate change, we mostly talk about how we can maintain our current human lifestyle – as if that’s the biggest thing we’re at risk of losing.
BC: To me this is where this idea becomes really unsettling when thinking about climate change, because as you point out in the novel, really the best way to save our environment is to get rid of humans. That can send one down a bit of a doom filled rabbit hole. How do you keep from feeling that kind of doom and gloom? Or do you feel the point of fixing climate change is to end the anthropocene?
DU: It’s comforting to me to think that the planet is going to be around for the foreseeable future. We as humans have an outsized influence on the planet, and we can destroy a lot of things on it, but the Earth itself is going to stick around until it gets enveloped by the Sun 5 billion years into the future. What’s most at risk, I think – in addition to the species that we’re causing to go extinct – is our current way of life, which I’m not that wedded to anyway. There’s this great book I’ve been rereading lately called The Ends of the World (Peter Brannen) which goes over, in detail, the Earth’s five previous mass extinctions. One of those extinctions, the Permian-Triassic extinction also known as “the great dying,” wiped out up to 96% of ocean species and 70% of land species. But even then the planet was still here, and enough forms of life still survived to eventually evolve. I spend a lot of time out in the forests around Syracuse hiking. Sometimes my family and I might see only 1 or 2 other people the entire day. I think that creates a healthy shift in my perspective - that the future doesn’t need to be all about us.
I like the wording of your second question. Ending the anthropocene doesn’t mean getting rid of humans–but it does mean a radical reframing of our importance so that we wouldn’t be the dominant force shaping the planet’s future. I don’t think that needs to be doom and gloom at all. I think it would be more about discovering the value and wonder of all the other species on the planet– which sounds pretty wonderful to me actually.
BC: So I have a young daughter as well and this tends to fall into this same doom spiral for me, but also a guilt spiral. Knowing what we know about the climate and the world we’re living in, how do you reconcile personally expanding the population? How do you try to keep from feeling guilty almost for bringing a child into this world? And what is it you think about human nature that makes it that we keep wanting to have kids?
DU: These are great questions. With regards to personally expanding the population through our individual children: a fascinating 2021 study by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes points out that oil corporations like Exxon worked actively through public campaigns to make individuals think it was their personal choices causing climate change to spiral out of control. From a great Vox article about the study: “Shaming individuals has pretty much always been a part of the climate discourse. Political leaders focus on recycling and consumption of plastics, rather than banning production, and now “flight shame” has taken off as a way to discourage plane travel to tackle the rising footprint of transportation emissions. But shame has a dark side: It can be a distraction that lets key perpetrators of climate change off the hook.” Really climate change is a larger societal problem with regulatory solutions. Change needs to happen at the international level and involve corporations and nations. I think this is all important to remember.
I think bringing children into the world is hopeful. And having children helped me shift my perspective away from a universe where I was at the center. The world (and humanity) is going to need all the help it can get in the near future, and I think the generation that’s growing up right now is growing up in such a different world. They’re much more aware of climate change and much more aware of what’s at risk through inaction, so maybe they can better figure out how we need to adapt in the near future to save as much as possible.
BC: What would you say was the philosophy behind After World? The story feels so textured and complex, and far more than just an AI story or a climate catastrophe story. I would love to know more about your thinking in creating this world.
DU: My goal was to create a post-apocalyptic world that felt real to me, with characters who acted in ways that felt both familiar and real to me. While I care deeply about the planet and I’m fascinated by AI, I knew I wanted this novel to focus in on how it felt to live through the last years of humanity. I have a deep love for the post-apocalyptic genre but the framework of heroism and adventure in those books has never felt quite accurate to me. I wanted to create a near-future book that felt accurate to me. I also wanted to write something that interested me formally–which, in After World’s case, meant playing around with time and fragmentation while addressing a world (and a character) from a variety of angles. I’m interested in how a story changes depending on who’s telling it – and how you can turn an unhappy story into a happy one, or vice versa, depending on where you place the ending.
BC: This apocalyptic realism definitely comes across in After World, to the point that I’ve read some Goodreads reviews calling some parts of the novel repetitive, but yeah of course it’s repetitive, the world is ending! (I personally loved that you went to places like that, where instead of trying to manufacture drama, you say, “Look, the world is ending, you are sitting on your ass and just trying not to die.”) Another part of this realism that I loved were the entries of words to be omitted after the transition. Where did that idea of that come from, and what was the reasoning in choosing the words you chose?
DU: I’m going to take those comments about repetition as a sign that my book is doing what I wanted it to do – which is to describe an apocalypse realistically. I remember my daughter and I talking during COVID-19 about how we never thought an apocalypse would be so boring. It is a lot of sitting around. I’m also curious why, as readers, we shy away from repetition or even feelings of boredom in our reading.
I spend a lot of time in the online Oxford English Dictionary (some libraries, like the Brooklyn Public Library, offer free access!). It’s considered a historical dictionary in that it shows how the meaning of words changes over time–and, inevitably, how we lose meanings (or lose words) over time. I find it fascinating how the words we use - or stop using - mirror the changes in our society. (The Webster’s 1828 dictionary and Webster’s 1913 dictionary are fascinating for the same reason). So when writing about the extinction of humanity, I became interested in how such an event would change our language. As for why I chose the words I did: someone at a recent book club asked me why “guacamole” made the list of words that needed to be removed, and I replied I probably needed a “gu” word and maybe I was eating guacamole that day too. Though it still fascinates me to think that no avocado would ever be smashed, no onions and no cilantro ever chopped and added again once we’re gone. I feel this outsized sense of loss when I think about that, even for a word like guacamole.
BC: Honestly, I don’t know if I’d want to live in a world without guacamole.
There were portions of those lists that seriously brought me close to tears, because like you said, these words would have no use in a world without humans. The Fs in particular: Fertilization(human), fetal distress, fetal monitor, fetus, forecasting, future, etc. It really makes you think about what is lost in this. And to go along with the framing idea, in a lot of ways these word lists kind’ve frame the story itself. How much of that was intentional when plotting out this story?
DU: I wish I had known the shape this novel was going to take ahead of time – it would have saved me a lot of time. I kind of write by overwriting and then edit by pulling things out. So I didn’t know where the novel was going when I started writing it – all I knew was that humans had gone extinct, but before then, there was a girl named Sen who suffered in a cabin. The word lists and the glossary came about as a kind of side project, a way of world building, and yet another way to understand Sen’s situation.
BC: As for the boring part: I think that was something a lot of people realized during Covid, just that feeling of “Man, if this is it, it’s really boring!” But I think also there were a lot of realizations during that time and epiphanies that people weren’t expecting. You had a lot of divorces, career changes, picking up new hobbies, etc. So not to be too hokey, but what do you feel you learned or realized about yourself, or our world during that time? How do you feel our time in isolation changed you? AND would there be an After World as it is, without that experience?
DU: I signed my contract with my first agent for After World the summer before Covid hit - so the novel was mostly done before the pandemic (though I still had to figure out the narrator and the structure). Covid confirmed for me a few things: that an apocalyptic situation will not necessarily bring people together; that small isolated enclaves might form; that fear made people look out for themselves; and that by humans acting less like typical humans, the world could heal (I loved reading how the air quality improved during the first few months of lockdown). Personally, I realized I liked the descheduled life: how special it was, to not have to look at my calendar for weeks on end because nothing was happening. I started doing macro photography during Covid and also trying to teach myself the names of plants and trees (and I tried foraging a little). I couldn’t read fiction for the first several months of the pandemic – my mind was too all over the place –but I could read foraging books and plant guides and loved reading about their different usages and trying to memorize how to ID them. I found learning the names of plants to be comforting and it changed the way that I see forests now.
(Side Note: I greatly recommend giving Debbie’s Instagram a look, the macro photography is pretty great.)
BC: That realization that an apocalyptic situation wouldn’t bring the world together, was definitely disheartening. I remember the early days when there was some universal buy-in with “14 days to stop the spread”. But it felt like once people started feeling personally inconvenienced the unity was over. I think a lot of people really bought into the theory before that if we were ever invaded by aliens the whole world would unite, and now I don’t think many people really believe that.
But I do recall that feeling of turning into ourselves, and to me that was always kind’ve an underrated part of the lockdown, picking up new hobbies or skills that we likely never would’ve given ourselves the time to try. I remember in those Spring months laying in my hammock, reading, while our chickens roamed the yard and nipped at my feet. I still see this as a very relaxing time, despite what was happening beyond my fence. Maybe there’s kind’ve an unwritten phase in apocalypses where people adjust, or accept a new form of life; humans have that uncanny ability to create an equilibrium despite any circumstances.
DU: Your description of the pandemic is right on - this feeling of peace and a slower pace “despite what was happening beyond my fence.” Feelings about that time are so complicated. And yes to human adaptation. I was surprised how quickly my kids adapted to being home all the time – and even wearing masks when they went back to school. I remember my daughter told me it was weird to see the full faces of her classmates when they stopped wearing masks. Do you remember how important people’s eyes were back then? Another thing I miss: how you had to stare into people’s eyes to figure out social cues and emotions.
“Do you remember how important people’s eyes were back then? Another thing I miss: how you had to stare into people’s eyes to figure out social cues and emotions,” - Debbie Urbanski
BC: I love the idea of how a story changes depending on the angle and who’s telling it. I often talk about this idea of framing a story, that essentially how you frame the story can tell as much about the story as the story itself. Throughout After World there are a lot of really interesting framing choices, from point of view of the AI, Sen, the technical entries, etc. How did you find your perspectives and framing play a role in the storytelling as a whole, and how did it change, or define, the story itself?
DU: “How you frame the story can tell as much about the story as the story itself” - yes! Long ago I did my undergrad degree in medieval history, and one thing I loved about that subject was the difficulty in figuring out what exactly happened in the past. We know what this person said happened, but they have their own motivations, biases, and blinders. I think, more than any literature class, studying medieval sources made me realize how relative reality is. With regards to Sen: I was interested in how, even at the end of the novel, we may not really know her. We probably know the storyworker narrator better than her. That feels like yet another loss to me - and another reason why Sen’s anger is justified. What I think is great about this kind of storytelling is that the reader gets to take an active role (like that of a historian) in trying to figure out – what exactly did happen? And what does this particular version of what happened tell us about the person or entity telling the story?
BC: Wow, I never would’ve thought while reading After World that some of your big influence was medieval history (I’m going to have to call some former students.) What did you find about studying medieval history that led you to see reality as relative? And what can our feudal ancestors teach us about our world today?
DU: This was such a long time ago so I’m going to need to be vague – but I remember reading multiple sources about a single event, and the details of the event would change depending on who was writing down what happened.. There was no authoritative account of anything - I could only see the past through a particular person’s eyes.
As for what medieval folks can teach us about our world today – I found it incredibly moving that Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were still entertaining and funny even after so many hundreds of years. I think that says something about the connecting power of literature.
BC: The dreaded AI question. It seems you have a far more favorable opinion of AI than I do. (so far everything I’ve seen come out makes me quite worried about it.) Do you believe with all the good and bad of AI that it will be a net positive for the world and why/how?
DU: Part of my optimism is radical acceptance – AI is here and it’s only going to become more integrated in our lives. But I do think the news cycle has been focused on large language models like Chat GPT and people’s anxiety over them. I’m continuing to lean toward AI being a net positive for the world. Artificial intelligence is already being used in so many different and useful ways – in helping us understand the language of sperm whales (see Project CETI), or better diagnosing skin cancer and breast cancer, or creating a personalized cancer vaccines, or providing more accurate climate modeling. I’m glad people are concerned about AI, we should all be on some level concerned, but I’ll be honest, I’m more concerned about the irreplaceable loss of biodiversity.
BC: If you could speak to a younger version of yourself, what would you want to say?
DU: I would tell myself to get on antidepressants much, much earlier - I probably needed them in high school. And I would also tell my younger self to sign up for DBT (Dialectical Behavioral Therapy). Those two things would have saved me many years of suffering if I did them earlier.
BC: What would you want to be the final takeaway for anyone reading After World, or anything you’d want people to know?
DU: I’m really open to whatever the reader makes of the book. I kept a lot of things deliberately open-ended on purpose – partly because even I don’t know all the answers with this book, but also I think there are multiple readings and takeaways that a reader can make. As for anything I’d want people to know: Central New York, where Sen settles down in her cabin, is an amazingly beautiful place and well worth a visit – beautiful forests, hollows, gorges, waterfalls, creeks, and solitude. Particularly Sen ends up living in Morgan Hill State Forest near the Onondaga branch of the Finger Lakes Trail, which is one of my favorite places in the world.
BC: Lastly, if you could have any superpower what would it be and why?
DU: I was talking with my daughter about this question, and she says this wouldn’t be a true superpower, but I’d like the ability to be able to hike through forests forever - because I’m really happiest while hiking. It’s like a very deep true happiness, devoid of any anxiety - you see where you have to go on the trail and then you go there. As a backup, I’d like to be able to communicate to plants and trees, so that I can try and understand their perspective of the world.
So many thanks to Debbie for sitting down with me, (metaphorically speaking), and having such a great discussion.
For my full review and a synopsis of the novel you can read my last post here.
This is an awesome novel, Debbie Urbanski is an awesome person, and you should all go out and get yourself a copy!
Gonna buy it. Gonna read it.