Q&A With Ace Sci-Fi Writer Debbie Urbanski

Portalmania author Debbie Urbanski speaks about the exploration of asexuality across genres and the need for widening the scope of the asexual experience in fiction

By: Frannie Sprouls 

What would you do if a portal appeared? Would you step through to a world unknown, leaving the people you know behind? Or would you stay? 

In her short story collection Portalmania, Debbie Urbanski explores betrayal, parenthood, revenge, open marriages, neurodiversity, and asexuality across genres in a way that opens up new portals of understanding. Rifts multiply as political division builds across the country in “Long May My Land Be Bright.” A woman navigates her family’s obsession with portals in “A Few Personal Observations on Portals,” while a husband struggles to understand his wife's transformation in “How to Kiss a Hojacki.” 

Throughout the stories, Urbanski infuses her own experiences navigating her asexuality and creates a wider understanding of love and intimacy. 

She spoke with AforAce about writing Portalmania and its exploration of asexuality across sci-fi, fantasy, and horror; the need for widening the narrative of what asexuality is; and thinking about relationships from a new point of view.

Tell me a little bit about Portalmania and its creation. What was the motivation behind writing a short story collection and what was that process like? 

I went to grad school for poetry and ended up switching to fiction a few years out. I think I gravitated toward the short story because of its length; it resembled a poem more than a novel does. I also find you could be more playful in short stories and challenge the reader a little bit if you wanted to, where they might get exhausted from that at a novel length. I wrote short stories for 20 years or so, and I really wanted to have a collection a lot of times along the way. But the agents I spoke with all wanted a novel.

Short story collections are hard to sell, so publishers are hesitant to publish them. I wrote a novel called After World, so I could get my story collection out. I had about 50 stories to choose from, and my agent was the one who thought, let’s take the portal stories to anchor the collection and then see what else we could fill in. We came up with this idea of not belonging as one of the big themes, and then expanding portals to being one of those big decisions that we have in our lives where you choose to go one direction or the other.

Book cover: Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

What were some of the other important themes that you wanted to weave through each of the stories as you were narrowing down the stories for the collection?  

A lot of my stories are about constricting ideas of love or of marriage or motherhood because I definitely felt that throughout my life. So the stories explore different ideas of love and how love could look messy and not be … not kind, necessarily, but it could still be love. I was interested in exploring different sorts of relationships, mostly with parenthood and then significant others.

Portalmania dives into various genres—sci-fi, fantasy, horror, realism. How did these genres provide you the space to explore asexuality, love, and intimacy? 

There does seem to be when you see ace rep in books, often it is in a genre setting, right?

I always loved sci-fi and fantasy and horror as a kid, and I think that was because I felt like this world wasn’t quite right for me. I’ve heard a lot of other ace people feel the same way when they’re growing up. Hopefully not so much anymore.

Partly, I wrote in these genres because those are the genres I love. But I also really wanted to get the reader to feel the emotions that I had felt in these complicated situations that I’ve had in my life because of a mixed orientation, marriage, and particularly some really bad marriage therapy. I felt like I could better do that through horror and speculative fiction somehow. 

I’m not the first to do this, but there is the idea of someone changing physically into another being. That happens in our relationships a lot, too, and it happened in mine where you realize something about yourself or who you really are, and then the other person has to come to terms with this new self in the relationship. I felt like I could examine that more easily or more effectively through allegory and metaphor.

Reading through these short stories, it gave me a new perspective on how to present asexuality within fiction that wasn't just a coming-out narrative or asexuality 101. Tell me more about your exploration, particularly the focus on compulsory sexuality.

When I was writing these stories in the mid- to late-2010s, the depiction of asexuality [in fiction] that I saw was really a celebration, which I think is necessary and it’s still necessary. But at the same time, that only tells part of the story.

I learned the term recently nonnormative, asexuality in a nonnormative setting versus queer norm. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing or interested in, but someone on Reddit had mentioned they were looking for stories that show queer characters in a nonnormative setting. I’m like, “Oh, that’s it. Yes.” Because I don’t think we’re there yet. I think sometimes we want to present what we hope society will be in 50 years, but I don’t think we’ll get there unless we show what’s happening. 

I follow Yasmin Benoit, and she's doing a lot of work in the UK. The conversation is different there than in the US, because they're really focusing on the possibility of conversion therapy for asexuals and workplace protection. Online, I’ve seen people wondering what’s so hard about being asexual and why do we even belong in queer spaces or Pride month. 

Really, I just wanted to explore my own experiences, which weren’t easy. As I was doing that, I did hope these stories can become part of the narrative that ace writers are telling. The ace community is younger, too, so hearing from parents who are ace or older aces … I wanted to share my own story and widen the narrative of asexuality.

Headshot: Stella Urbanski

For many of these stories, you drew on your own experiences of coming out as ace in the mid-2000s. It’s a very different landscape than even the mid-2010s when I came out. Can you speak to what those years were like? 

For me, they were confusing because you definitely felt like something’s wrong. In my relationship, too, that’s how we approached it: what is wrong with me, unfortunately. For my poetry thesis, I wrote a series of sonnets called “The Girl Who Didn’t Like Sex.” I didn’t have the name for it. I didn’t even know what asexuality was, but I was definitely exploring this experience that I was having that felt really different. I remember my poetry professor being a little stumped.

It unfortunately involved therapy, and therapy throughout the 2000s and into the 2010s, too, where the therapists didn’t have the right vocabulary either. So it was framed as, “How can we get you to be normal?” That even still happened, though, in the mid-2010s when my partner and I tried another bout of marriage therapy for a couple of years. That was the hardest part, the therapy because my partner and I really needed help. You go to this person who’s supposed to know what they’re doing and instead, they just make the situation worse.

I recently approached the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy, and I wanted to just give them my book to say, “Please read it and make sure you guys never treat asexuals again like this.” But they invited me to write an essay about my experiences for their newsletter that’s going to go out to 20,000 therapists. Out of the whole experience, that’s what I’m most excited about. That’s my dream behind these stories.

Writing about lived experiences, even in fiction, can be challenging, but it can also provide catharsis or release. Were there any moments when working on Portalmania that provided that? 

I was looking back at some notes from that time period for the essay, and some of the sentences that I wrote—just feeling like I can't be myself, like I should be another person—I feel like I really captured that in those stories. My writing at the time gave me control over a situation where I felt like I had no control. It was really necessary. I could build something lasting that I'm proud of, and it helped get me through what was happening.

The latest story in this collection that I wrote was the “Dirty Golden Yellow House.” And that one, I finally felt in the right space to give the narrator, the main character, some agency. In a lot of the stories, the wife and the mother is really acted upon often or just stuck. In that one, I decided, first, I’m going to do whatever I want with the form. So I bring in some nonfiction or essay or meta elements. Then I’m also going to let the woman do whatever she wants in the story. 

It was really satisfying. That was my closure. Once I wrote that, I felt like, “Oh, I can finally move on to other stuff in a really good way.”

If someone reading Portalmania has never heard of asexuality or knows very little about it, what do you want them to walk away with when they finish reading? 

In general, I hope that they look at their own assumptions about relationships and love. The best feedback I’ve gotten is from people, especially guys, who say that they’re thinking about their marriage differently or their relationship differently. Even outside of asexuality, there is compulsory sexuality, the idea that sex is the ultimate way of connecting and form of pleasure. That it’s necessary in order to experience love. I would love for people to realize that’s really damaging not just to the ace community but also to everybody.

Angela Chen in her book Ace makes it so applicable, how if we start thinking about sex and intimacy differently, the world could be better. I would love for people to just question their own relationships a little bit, what they’re requiring of their significant others or the people in their lives. 

Do you plan to explore more about asexuality in your future projects? Any themes in particular? 

We talked a little bit about normative and non-normative settings, and I think I am ready to just have my characters be ace or aromantic and to not have to comment on that, not have it be so hard for them. In my novel, which I wrote after most of these stories, I decided to make most everyone in the entire world ace or aro because I wanted to. I also made most of them women. It was really great. It let me focus on other things, and I just was so glad that I didn’t have to worry about that tension anymore. I think I’d like to continue having my characters be ace and focus. I’m interested in focusing on friendship, like deep friendships more, or also just non-human narratives. 

I’m reading a book called The Wall right now by Marlen Haushofer, and I was actually thinking it could be an ace book in some ways. The main character is the only human pretty much left, and she’s forming these really deep connections with the animals around her. But it’s really beautiful. So maybe exploring something like that.

What advice do you have for ace and a-spec writers? 

There could be this pressure to show that we’re okay. I think it’s fine, and actually it could be good to show if there’s areas we struggle in as well. There’s a Lithuanian movie, Slow. The director had said she could have given it a happy ending, which is what I wanted, but she really wanted to let this couple experience problems that any couple would experience in a relationship. I thought that was really a good point where it’s tempting to want to see everything work out okay, but to just allow these characters to be human and to fail and be bad or make mistakes. 

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This interview was edited for length and clarity.