This story started with the title. It was just a phrase that popped into my head one day and became a brain worm of sorts. I had no story, no character, and no setting for it, but those two words felt like they had a lot of potential. It was also around this time that my mom was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, and her condition made apparent to me the connection between our memories and how they coalesce to create who we are. Anything affecting these memories fundamentally alters the self, however the “self” might be conceived.

My ideal reader, for short stories at least, has always been someone who is willing to take a journey blind without advance promises of specific story elements, to wit: “This story is about a heroic quest and there is at least one elf in it.” My ideal reader is someone who won’t complain afterward that they only like stories if the main character is “likeable,” if it takes place in a world where they would like to live. And I fortunately meet this kind of reader all the time. I think I’m talking to one now.

The entire story also started with another image (years back—I’m a slow writer!): the opening image of the trees that were constantly dropping their leaves in the perpetual autumn of this planet, creating huge piles of dead leaves that never disappear. It’s an image that I find both beautiful and chilling, and that is the tone I hoped to set for the story.

I think I was surprised by how quickly I came to love this lady I had invented. When we think about these kinds of societies, be it Stalinist Russia or North Korea, they are abstractions, with comic book villains at the helm and huddled faceless masses suffering in obscurity. But of course the people that live in these states are real people, living real lives, trying to find joy, like everyone. So although this idea really was kind of a joke, a bit, for it to work Janet had to be real, to be human and honest in her enthusiasms and her fears. So I fell in love with her, as we do with all of our protagonists.

I read about an invasion and siege in 1551, when ships from the Ottoman Empire attacked the island of Gozo and carried away some five or six thousand people, leaving only a tiny number of the island inhabitants behind. I immediately started wondering about those few people left behind, about what you can do when invaders steal away everybody you know, about what’s left when you’re the one who gets away. This story is not a fictionalized version of that event or a metaphor for that event in any way.

I was thinking about the spaces that characters and advertising mascots occupy in our dreams. They’re recurring figures alongside our friends and relatives. I don’t believe that we’ve lost something or whatever because Luke Skywalker shows up instead of a Jungian hermit. That’s what happens when we tell stories in visual media (and when certain companies figure out the best way to your wallet is through your imagination). But I think it’s easy for our brains to grab these characters and mascots and throw them in the mix as a mentor or an enemy.

I love fairy tales and folk tales. I particularly love seeing how they intersect. Go back far enough, and you begin to see how multiple versions of a story spread over time, like tributaries flowing out of a single source. Some fairy tales are thousands of years old. We tell and re-tell them. Languages split from their roots and evolve. Wolves become bears become tigers. The monkey wife becomes a dog bride becomes a mouse maiden. Stories don’t stay the same, and they don’t just entertain and instruct.

It’s so interesting to me that you see that link to Mnemosyne in the story, and I love that you do. I often draw on myth in my work, but this time, I didn’t—at least not consciously. My conscious inspiration was the word “lachrymist” itself. It crossed my path on Twitter as an entry on unusual words (I love words and I follow multiple dictionaries). I was so taken with the definition that I decided to see if I could write a story about a lachrymist.