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Setting the stage
Today, I’m with Debbie Urbanski, author of an upcoming book, Portalmania. Can you imagine going through a portal into a new world? In Debbie’s work, portals are both openings and closings. They are transitions between us and others, and between different versions of ourselves. The impact on people who go through them is powerful. She talks about a terrifying and wide open future. Portalmania brought up memories of my past, moments when today I would actually say I went through a portal. Have you? Read Portalmania, listen to this conversation, and you’ll see what you feel. Let’s talk with Debbie now.
Well, Debbie, it’s amazing to see you.
DEBBIE
It’s so nice to see you too.
JANE
I mean, we’ve communicated a little bit over the past few months, but it’s not the same as actually seeing each other face to face. Now, Portalmania is quite a name. And the first thing I wanted to ask you was, I realized it’s different stories written at different points in time that you brought together. And your time span, I believe it was like six or seven years from the first to the most recent?
DEBBIE
Yeah, yeah, seven years, yep.
What’s behind Portalmania?
And I just wondered if there was something in life. I don’t mean your life personally, but in life, in the era we live in, that pushed you to bringing all this together.
DEBBIE
I’ve always loved the idea of portals, and it seems like ever since I was a kid, I just loved portal stories. Alice in Wonderland, Narnia. I think there’s something really attractive as a child, but I never kind of outgrew that. So for me, I always was very interested about finding these, kind of like why you would leave, where you would go. Would it be better than where you left, and would you come back again? I think those are mean, even outside of portals, those are just kind of big questions, right?
JANE
They’re fundamental life questions.
DEBBIE
Yeah, yeah. Would we want to leave our lives if we could? And interestingly, now when things feel so chaotic I think in the world for whatever reason, I think I’ve gotten some responses that people relate to those questions and just the idea of portals, leaving not even just their own lives, but their country or the current time or… But I find it interesting on a personal level, but also just thinking, is this, would we choose to live in this time if we had the choice? It’s a tough time to be living in, so.
JANE
I looked up the word mania, because I had a feeling that it was chosen very carefully, very deliberately on your part. And I see from a medical viewpoint, I used the Cleveland Clinic website, which I think is really good for information. And they say mania is a condition of abnormally elevated mood, activity or behavior. And I think that actually, I looked that up just a couple of days ago, and I think it fits the feeling I got from a lot of your characters. Things were abnormally in one direction or another direction, that was part of what was happening. Did you choose the word mania or the title Portalmania, with any particular idea?
DEBBIE
I’m interested in terms that are medicalized. Like Hysteria for instance, is a story, and that’s something that’s often applied, a word that’s often applied to women or was especially. And I feel like I do have to mention, my son named, somehow came up with this title and we all loved it. My son’s 17 at the time, and we were brainstorming titles at the dinner table, and he found this one and I loved it, my editor loved it, so we decided to stay with it. But I find the idea of, so mania and the definition, you mentioned where it’s abnormally, was it abnormally elevated?
JANE
Yeah, it was abnormally elevated mood, activity or behavior.
DEBBIE
Yeah, and that idea of abnormal, I think is really important too. Who defines what’s normal and not? And I feel like that’s what the characters are struggling with a lot throughout this book. And I think they’ve been, that whatever the relationships or how they experience the world has been labeled as abnormal, and it’s not for them, it’s just how they are. So yeah, I find that idea really interesting.
JANE
It comes across in a lot of the stories. Now, we don’t want to have spoilers in our conversation because I think a lot of people are going to read your book. And I know for me, reading it the first time was really interesting. Then I went over it again but quickly, choosing sections I wanted to reread, and I felt like I was entering another world, Debbie. My second time around, it was a very strange feeling. It brought back some memories from things that happened to me and episodes in my life when I was younger, and it had an impact on me, and I was not even reading it straight through. I was just picking sections that I wanted to talk to you about. In fact, that was the purpose of my second rereading. I think that your readers are going to very likely have a lot of strong reactions, a lot of emotional, maybe intellectual, but also emotional reactions to your stories.
One thing you talk about in an early story is, you talk about radical love and not having a second chance. Not everybody has a second chance. The world is not as it should be, and no one’s doing anything about it, you said in a story. No one imagined they had a choice of worlds and that they had a second chance. So for you, is going through a portal a second chance for some people?
People can’t find their portals
Well, yeah, yeah, I think so. And I think that in several of the stories, there’s a frustration because the narrator can’t find their portal, right?
JANE
Yeah, yeah.
DEBBIE
And people around them are finding their own portals or just if there’s one word, her mom is finding a portal and she can’t. And I think the narrators are so convinced that they need a different world but they can’t get there, and so yeah, so they feel stuck in this world, like they don’t belong here and they can’t get out of it. And yeah, they can’t find their portals often.
JANE
I think that’s something that people feel often, whatever situation they’re in. They’re in a difficult situation personally, professionally or socially, and they don’t know how they can change it.
DEBBIE
Yeah, and therapy, I’ve done a lot of therapy and I know in the back of my mind, my therapist is saying, “Of course you could change things,” right? I mean, that’s the ideal, but I think maybe that’s not always true or maybe it’s just you want the world to change instead of you, or you want definitions of what’s normal to change instead of you. So, there’s some tension there.
The odd and even presidents
Your story about the right, not the right and the left, the even and the odd, the even day and the odd day, the even president and the odd president. I can’t believe that you didn’t write that just a few months ago.
DEBBIE
No, it’s kind of, yeah, yeah.
JANE
A lot of things in it that just are really relevant to what we’re going through right now. And it’s such a brilliant idea, the even, odd idea. And I love when you talk about the time between 9:00 PM and 3:00 AM, which is where there’s the most conflict because that’s when the odd and the even evenings leak into each other. And I never thought about that before, that’s quite a statement
DEBBIE
I was interested in… So where I set that story is in a town, Marcellus, which is west of Syracuse. And I was looking for a place that had equal numbers of Trump, and at the time it was Hillary Clinton supporters, and that town, which is kind of an idyllic town, had pretty much equal, it was split right in the middle. So, I felt like there would be some kind of tension geographically there, but also if we were switching from who we were as a country every day, I think that same tension would happen during those hours too, when our boundaries blur and we’re not sure who we are, which is kind of our constant state right now, to be honest.
Going down into rifts
Yeah, and you talk about the rifts, I guess you could say, a big break between these two viewpoints. You said the narrator of the story wanted to leave a record so people would remember once possible to live a shared reality. If we can remember, perhaps we can rebind. That’s a powerful statement.
DEBBIE
I reread, I was rereading some of these stories yesterday for our conversation, and that made me so sad. That line stood out to me too, and just the whole story that because I feel like if anything, things have gotten more extreme. I mean, it’s kind of that vision, which I wrote in 2016, 2017, it almost seems naive in some ways. I think if I wrote that story now, there’d be a lot more violence. I think the rifts would be a lot, they would be breaking something instead of just the world kind of separating, the earth separating. I think it felt really different in 2016 than it did say 10 years previous, and it feels different now than it did back then where you wonder if we’ll be able to make our way back to where we could connect again. These two sides who seem to feel like they have nothing in common anymore.
JANE
Yeah, that’s really true, isn’t it? I like the fact that, I think it’s at the end of the story, a woman goes down a rift and the man will not come down. He said, “It’s a woman’s job.” Do you remember that?
DEBBIE
Yeah. I mean, it was kind of playing around with the idea of women’s work and men’s work, and yeah, it might’ve been one of the days where it was like Republican conservatives, so I felt like that would be even stronger on those days. But I do feel like, I mean, not that I’ve seen this as much, but in my mind, women aren’t necessarily the ones who started wars or I do imagine us as I do think in my life, women tend to be really good listeners. Right? I mean, you’re a great example of that change.
JANE
Yeah, we’re trained. We’re trained that why aren’t we? That’s the way we’re brought up.
DEBBIE
Yeah.
JANE
I mean, as that children at school and professionally, to listen to others.
DEBBIE
Yeah, and to ask questions and to not necessarily, the point of conversations is not necessarily to get our opinion across, but maybe it’s to understand people better. I mean, that’s my hope. So that’s what I was hoping for this narrator that, or for somebody needs to do it, right? Somebody has to go into those middle places and figure out what’s there.
Relationships between parents and children
Moving on to one of the other themes that I found fascinating was the relationship between parents and children. That was very strong in your work, and there were several things there that really surprised me when I think about parents and children. And well, there were so many notes I took, I’m just debating about which. I’ll just give you one here. One is you say, children see things parents cannot see. These views are a gift. Parents should not push away.
DEBBIE
Yeah, I imagine I was referring to portals in that case maybe, but, or maybe it was in, there’s a novella in the middle, LK-32-C, where the moms-
JANE
Yeah, that’s where I got that quote.
DEBBIE
Okay interesting, because I think that also applies to the idea of portals. There’s a mom whose kids are seeing portals and she’s not. In that novella, the mom is struggling so hard to understand how her son sees the world, and it’s really difficult. It’s really difficult when you have a child who is unlike you and you might not be able to… This I guess, is a theme that runs in a few stories that you feel like you don’t have a lot to give that child. Right? You can’t teach the child not what the child needs to know. I think there’s a lot of struggle in trying to accept what the children are offering, because perhaps it’s not what one expected to get as a parent. Right?
JANE
That’s what you suggest when at one point in one of those three parts of that novella, Luke says, “Later, I felt bad for you,” meaning his mother, “Because you will never see what I get to see.” And then she says, “He’s going to see reality so differently than us that he can dream up questions we would never think of asking.” I find that a really powerful idea. The younger generation is going to imagine things, ask questions, take us to places that we couldn’t imagine. That comes up repeatedly.
DEBBIE
Yeah, and that’s hopeful, right?
JANE
It’s very, very hopeful.
DEBBIE
As long as we don’t shut the younger generation down and insist that they act like us or look like us or have the same definitions as us, yeah.
What should parents do or not do for their children?
There’s a place where you talk about that, where the mother says, “I watched my son’s world constrict around him until he could barely take a breath. Actually, that is inaccurate. It was our world doing the constricting. Luke’s world who was supposed to be remained enormous and vast and open.”
DEBBIE
Yeah, that was a hard story to reread too. I texted a friend last night saying, “Please remind me to write something happy next time I write a story,” because I mean, there’s a lot of emotion from my own life that I poured into the book. And I think watching one’s kid struggle in the world is a really awful experience, especially if you feel like you can’t help, that you can’t change the world enough to accommodate that kid. And yeah, I mean, it’s a terrible situation, which is probably why I’ve been thinking so much about portals. I just wanted to put one of my… Well, I think maybe it’s natural that we want to put our kids in a place that is perfect for them, right? And it might not be the current world, and that’s really frustrating.
JANE
Yeah, and you talk about the mother who, because she loved her son, allowed him to travel without her to another world, a world that she made for him. And so that’s the idea of the mother made a world she couldn’t go to, and she wanted her son to be able to go there. I mean, that’s sort of the ultimate, I think, in mother love.
DEBBIE
Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say that, that’s like the definition of love for me, is realizing you might not be what you’re… Letting go of what you need and focusing on what the child needs, because what a mom wants her kid close by and to have traditional definitions of love and affection, but maybe that’s not what this child needed in that case. Yeah.
JANE
Yeah, and then when I came across the idea of couples, in a lot of your stories, there was a theme of couples. And there was this amazing lady who sat out in someone’s yard on a chair and was just, instead of going to work or sleeping in her bed, she sat in front of your house. I mean, the speaker’s house, and stared at her portal. And it says, “Even I could see how her actual life was becoming a boring story compared to the potential narrative that the portal offered.”
Couples – should we accept our current lives?
In that story, the narrator’s kind of worried about portals and wondering if portals… And I think this is important to think about too. Portals could be, like we were talking about for children, we make another world for them, that’s an act of love. But I think portals could also encourage us to not accept our current life or to just keep thinking like, oh, things are going to be better over there, I don’t need to worry about what’s happening now or look at my life now. So, I think that’s what was happening in that, is that yeah, that the woman who sat in her chair, just she was facing a different direction than, no judgment there, but it is tempting. It’s tempting to look over there and think, wow, that’s my real life, it’s not what I’m actually in.
JANE
And then you have other cases where the couple stays together. For example, the guy says, “All I want is something different right now, like someone who isn’t you, in addition to you.” And then a similar quote afterwards, and I believe he’s the one who says that if a certain person wanted to have a portal, they would need to become someone different, someone who didn’t need to control other people’s lives.
DEBBIE
The dynamics of that couple is really fascinating to me, because the wife is convinced. She is trying really to want her life as it is. She believes that if she went through a portal, it would be just the same life as she has, but everyone around her is choosing, her interest in changing their lives. So yeah, there’s a lot of sadness there.
JANE
Because she doesn’t want to change her life, and I think her husband-
DEBBIE
I think she’s trying to convince herself. Yeah, yeah.
JANE
Yeah, it’s a struggle. And the man she’s with apparently still loves her, if I remember the story correctly.
DEBBIE
Yeah, yeah. I was very interested in all these stories to portray some of the complicated relationships that I don’t feel are often, you don’t often see in our stories or books. I mentioned in the end notes and it might be for the story, that I’d often get the feedback from readers that, why are these people still together? Or, I don’t believe this is love, I don’t. This wouldn’t actually-
JANE
I saw that, yeah.
DEBBIE
Yeah, these people wouldn’t stay together in real life. And I just find that surprising. I mean, I find that surprising and not true, and I think that comes from our narrow definitions of what love looks like.
JANE
Yeah. Our idea, the standard idea of love is, well, in my opinion, very out of date. I mean, love can be expressed in so many different ways, and I think that’s one of your points that goes across the book in different stories in different ways.
Blaming the current world
Yeah, and love, I think, in a committed relationship isn’t always going to look like happy or good or uninterested. I think I kind of blame the world for that, this current world, but sometimes people love each other and they stay together, even if it doesn’t look so great and it still counts.
JANE
What do you mean you blame the current world for what?
DEBBIE
Okay. I think a lot of unhappiness in some relationships is caused, at least this has been my experience, of these, again, these narrow definitions of what’s required in a relationship in love. You’re expecting, if there’s a marriage or committed partnership, that relationship is supposed to be the most important. It’s supposed to have sex and romance, and the other person isn’t supposed to change too much, or it’s okay to leave them. So in my mind, I would love to see the definition of love being like you love something essential about someone, but that’s able to change throughout time and you still love them, you’re interested in their development. And you don’t put all the pressure on getting everything you need from this one other person, but you value other relationships in your life equally.
JANE
That came in one of your stories, the idea about Zeff.
DEBBIE
Yeah, yeah, in the portal.
JANE
At one point he says, “She closed her eyes and remembered falling and Zeff standing over her, gazing up up on her as if he had known her all of his life, known what she once had been, what she was now, and what he would someday become. And he lived each of these versions equally and fully.”
DEBBIE
Yeah, there it is. That’s my-
JANE
That’s your idea of love.
DEBBIE
Yeah. I really love… Yeah. I love their relationship because it was really fun to write because I allowed them to change physically their forms and still love each other, which I don’t know, I find that really beautiful.
JANE
Yes, and not common.
Asexuality and other differences
There was a, I couldn’t find it, I was actually looking for it yesterday. But many years ago, probably when I was writing that story, people were just starting to talk about transgender transitions. And there was a couple, it was a trans woman and a woman, so originally the trans woman had identified as male and was living as a male. And they had been married, and then they were blogging during the transition period. And the woman who had, she was just so happy for her partner that her partner was truly expressing herself, who she always had been. They stayed together, it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever read. So, I was thinking a lot about that like wow, you don’t see that often. Right? That’s really great.
JANE
You said this is a blog, a blog story you read somewhere?
DEBBIE
Yeah, a lot, yeah. It probably was 2014, 2015.
JANE
Well, you did an interesting, not blog exactly, but on Substack very recently, you did an interesting piece that I read very carefully twice about asexuality. You remember that? Of course you remember that because I mean, you wrote it in March. It’s not that long ago, but you may have thought about it for a long time. And you made it very clear what asexuality is, I think that was very good. Did you get a lot of feedback from that or did you trigger ideas in people’s minds?
DEBBIE
I feel like there’s on Substack, there are a bunch of people writing about asexuality in a variety of ways, which is great. It’s not just me, there’s a sociologist I really like who constantly puts out, he’s studying it from a kind of academic perspective. So, I don’t know. I don’t know if… I think it was something I felt like I really wanted to write, and so I’m glad that I wrote it. I had been thinking about Portalmania, I wrote a couple more essays that are going to come out in May kind of about asexuality. But this one, I just felt so accosted by these articles that were appearing in the New York Times, that positioning as if all middle aged women desire the same thing. Sexual liberation in a very specific way. So I mean, it felt good to write, it felt good to get those ideas out there.
JANE
Good.
DEBBIE
Yeah.
JANE
Well, I think once your book comes out, it’ll even get more readers, get more attraction, I’m sure.
DEBBIE
Yeah. I hope so. They’re important ideas to be talking about.
Can we have a new wide open world for the young?
Yes, very important. I’m looking at the last section that I’ve called the future, and you called it CODA, of your book. And the reason I liked it was that there were two paragraphs that really struck me. One was, “Let the world, this world, I imagine new demanding of the world, expand to encompass every part of you.” So that’s let the world expand to encompass every part of you. In other words, you shouldn’t have to change yourself to adjust to the world, the world needs to be able to incorporate you.
DEBBIE
It’s what I really hope for the young people, the next generation. The story was kind of written with my daughter in mind some ways, and I liked that as an ending because it’s anti-portal. All my life I had been thinking, oh my God, I really need to get into another world to feel okay. Yeah, and then I thought, well, what if… I really feel like the young people are kind of demanding that the world change, so I’m hopeful. I am hopeful for them.
JANE
That’s the way you, another paragraph, I think it might’ve been the last one of that CODA, you talk about raking in the yard and you looked up and you saw the flying creature and she says, “You were my child up there. You were a movement in the sky, a flash of reflected light.” And then what I really highlighted was, “You were a terrifying and wide-open future.” And I think that’s very interesting because if a future is wide open, that is terrifying for a lot of people.
DEBBIE
Yeah, and I think that’s important to acknowledge. Right? I think that’s where a lot of anxieties come and all the anti-trans stuff that’s happening now, or… But I think people are scared that the world’s going to look different and they won’t recognize it, but I want it to look different, so I’m excited about it, but I understand. I wanted to also capture, that’s scary for some people, right?
JANE
Yeah. Well, actually, that takes me through my notes, Debbie. I’d like to know if you have any thoughts, any ideas or comments you’d like to express.
Think about relationships and change the world
I really appreciate what you highlighted in the book. I think you picked out some passages that were really important to me and kind of at the heart of… As a writer, I want to write stories and I love fiction, but I also do want, not to sound like I’m aiming too high, but I really do want to change the world in some small way. And with Afterworld and with Portalmania, I’m really hoping that these stories will get people to think about their own relationships and question some assumptions they might have about what love looks like and what’s required and what we require of each other to be in love. I have this picture in my mind of what the world could look like, and I mean, really, it doesn’t look much like the current world. So I just hope that this book will kind of get people to peek a little bit in maybe a different direction.
JANE
Well, I think it will.
DEBBIE
Well, Jane, thank you for such a close reading too. It was such, I don’t know, it means a lot that you read so closely and read Portalmania so closely, and then also picked out and met with all seriousness, the passages that were really important to me, so.
JANE
Ah, great.
DEBBIE
And that you responded to the book too, that just because it’s such a personal book, I’m still not sure how it’s going to play in the world.
JANE
It’ll probably play differently based on people. There’ll be people who will love it, and there’ll be people, Debbie, who will get very nervous when they read some of the things you talk about, in my opinion, which is a very good sign. If people are nervous about what you’re talking about, it means you’ve touched something that has touched them. I think you’ve done that really well, so.
DEBBIE
That’s a great point, thank you. I’ll keep that in mind. Yeah.
JANE
Okay, see you soon.
DEBBIE
Yeah, well, let’s keep in. Yeah.
JANE
We will, okay.
DEBBIE
Yeah. Thank you so much for reaching out.
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