You Are Someone Else Now

The third short story collection from Bogotá Writers

Migrant.

The word is often used in the news, usually to describe a large group of people who hail from many countries, as if the movement from one place to another can be a single, defining characteristic binding thousands, even millions, of individuals into one amorphous mass. 

And anyone who actually believes that is, of course, deluded.

We all start in one place and end in another. Even those people who stand still—whose clothes hang in the same closet, in the same city, for decades—migrate. They travel through time, through a world around them that is ever-changing.

The Bogotá Writers remind us that each person takes a singular journey in life.

The characters in this book wield guns and cricket bats; they strike out for new shores and face difficult returns; they dream of the future and ruminate on the past. These stories show us how individual each migrant experience is, and, in that respect, how universal. 

They have migration in their blood. 

Half of them came to the city by choice; others were deposited there at birth. But even the Bogotá-born migrate—like all good storytellers they travel regularly to new worlds, building their destinations with words as they go. 

~ From the Prologue, by Caroline Doherty de Novoa, author of The Belfast Girl