An Interview with “A Thorn in Your Memory” Author M. Darusha Wehm

What inspired A Thorn in Your Memory?

I wanted to explore what it would be like to find yourself traveling from world to world, gaining experiences and ideas, but also losing parts of your identity with every step. There’s something compelling to me about a character who is slowly losing their sense of self but can’t find a way to break out of the cycle.

There are many elements to this story—movement, disorientation, longing. What drew you to these elements?

They all followed naturally from the notion that travel changes a person, and travel to new and alien worlds would change a person irrevocably. The tension between wanting those novel experiences but also craving stability is something I think about a lot, and this story is definitely informed by that dichotomy.

The features of place (smell, feel, color) are also important elements of this story. When you find yourself in new spaces (or familiar ones after a long time), what is usually the first thing you notice? How does that manifest in your writing?

I’m generally a “see the forest before the trees” kind of person, and tend not to immediately focus on specifics in my own experience, so I generally struggle with detail in my writing. In this story, I was deliberately trying to spend more time with the small, sensory things.

To "travel" is a cool feature of the Many Worlds multiverse. Do you have a theory for why Travelers exist?

If I were an all-powerful, mysterious entity who had the power to create new worlds, I’d want someone to be able to see what I had done, so I’d have to give some of the people in those worlds the ability to travel between them. And if I were a person in one of those worlds, I’d definitely want to be able to experience as many of them as I could!

What's the most intriguing part of the Simulacrum for you?

I love the idea that small differences to a world can create a myriad of possibilities. Imagining the kinds of worlds we could have experienced if only something were changed is infinitely cool to me.