How to Appear Perfectly Indifferent While Crying on the Inside

Excerpts

ÖMËGÄ – Whenever A Red Digital Alarm Clock Reads 6:34 I Am Reminded Of My Father

Alt Lit Gossip – How to Appear Perfectly Indifferent While Crying on the Inside

Press

Weird Canada – “In a familiar Montreal permeated throughout by the surreal, Richie takes a funny and unsentimental approach to the anhedonic crawl through early adulthood in the digital age, as his characters download computer viruses to their brains, search fruitlessly for the Kim Kardashian sex tape, and question the legitimacy of their entire existence inside of a recognizably indifferent universe.”

Echo – “Ritchie’s style of irony imbues the simplest phrase with layers of potential meaning hidden beyond the first level, beyond explicit interpretation (…) A confessional writer for society itself.”

Jay Ritchie

A former editor for Metatron Press, Jay Ritchie is the author of the forthcoming poetry collection Listening in Many Publics (Invisible Publishing, 2024) as well as Cheer Up, Jay Ritchie (Coach House Books, 2017). He has an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst, where he won the Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry, the Skolfield/Goeckel Award for Poetry, and the Deborah Slosberg Memorial Award for Fiction. He has been the managing editor for Vallum: contemporary poetry magazine and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in SAND, Violet Indigo Blue, Etc., The Dalhousie Review, EVENT, Powder Keg, The Puritan, Spork, Peach Mag, glitterMOB, on CBC Radio, at the Newmarket National 10-minute Play Festival, and as part of a digital installation at the PHI Centre. Currently he is pursuing a PhD in English at McGill University on a SSHRC CGS Doctoral Scholarship and Graduate Excellence Fellowship, where his research examines how text and performance intersect in contemporary poetic practices. His current research project uses intermedial poetics to reframe central debates around text and performance by virtue of poetic practices not often explored by performance theory, and to bring controversies around the objecthood of texts into understandings of labour in the post-1970s shift to deindustrialization. He lives in Tio’tia:ke/Montreal.