Ryan Chapman on Stolen Ideas and How Dark Your Comedy Can Go

This week, Maris talks to Ryan Chapman, author of Riots I Have Known. Chapman is a Sri Lankan American novelist originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has written online and in print for The New Yorker, GQ, Longreads, Guernica, Bookforum, BOMB, and The Believer, and received residency fellowships from The Millay Colony and Vermont Studio Center. He lives in Kingston, New York.

From the episode

Ryan Chapman: My father and his family grew up in Sri Lanka, and they came to the States in the 1970s. That’s always been something part of our lives, but not a large part only until we were adults and took more frequent trips back to the island. Sri Lanka is such a unique nation, and not too dissimilar to the United States in certain ways in that there are a lot of religious and ethnic plurality. Recently, the Easter attacks have shown how it is a country that worked extraordinarily hard to heal after its civil war that ended in ’09, but unfortunately the population is still at odds, to put it inarticulately and mildly. By virtue of the fact that Sri Lanka had been colonized by several European powers and had been something of a toddler when it came to post-colonial independence … But because of the changes in power and the lack of any homogenous, religious, ethnic, or cultural group, it’s a fascinating country. and I kept approaching it as I got older wondering why it didn’t have a unified arts scene or industrial sector in the way that a lot of other countries of the same size have.

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RC: My roommate, when I started the book, was in Juilliard for playwriting and he went off to go work on Orange is the New Black, and there was a small subplot in season two or three where Piper works on the prison newsletter, and I was like, “Nick, you stole my idea.” He didn’t steal it; it was given to the universe. The idea came about as I was a straight male living in Park Slope and Gowns, Brooklyn, and I knew the world didn’t need more books about that experience or setting. When I thought about writing something that would be more voice-driven and be more transgressive, and my hope being that it would be a book that was five or ten percent beyond my talent level when I started, just through hitting my head against the wall and going down wrong avenues after a few years I would figure it out. Writing something that I didn’t have the autobiographical experience but an environment that was very fascinating and one that readers did’t come across very often.

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RC: Part of the challenge was … how dark can you make your comedy given your subject matter. It was fun to explore that, and it was a challenge to see how close you can go towards something being over-the-line and coming back a little bit. I think that’s one of the great things about fiction and the first-person voice is that, unlike a film or a painting or music, people will go with you to incredibly transgressive and dark paces and laugh at things that would never laugh at if they were told that same story at a dinner table. That’s the hope at least.

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Recommended reading:

Money by Martin Amis · The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack by Mark Leyner
The Loser by Thomas Bernhard · Too Loud a Solitude by Bohumil Hrabal
The Heart Is a Muscle The Size of a Fist by Sunil Yapa · On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman

Music:

Billie Eilish · The Magnetic Fields · Maris’s MP3 Blog Playlist