In the stories of Something You Were, Might Have Been, or Have Come to Represent, young singer-songwriters strive for fame and identity in the indie music scene. A young woman’s creative process is plagued with pop cultural dissonance during a European soul-search; a first-year university student has an existential crisis and eats the flowers that have started to appear on her doorstep; a call centre employee whose name newly yields a Google search hit is frustrated with his unimpressed co-workers; and one Montreal resident reaches the apogee of success and hits rock-bottom, all in the same year. With dry humour and twists of plot, Jay Winston Ritchie crafts a world replete with lasting images that resonate as both troubling and real. Each story poses an inquiry into how we shape our identity—which parts of ourselves we cull and which remain outside our locus of control.

Jay Ritchie is a writer, editor, teacher, and McGill English PhD student. Author of the poetry collection Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books, 2017), a collection of short stories, and a poetry chapbook, he has an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst and was the Assistant Editor for Metatron Press and Managing Editor of Vallum magazine. He lives in Tio’tia:ke / Montreal and can be found online at www.jayritchie.org.

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