Paul Ryder Ryan

 

Paul Ryder Ryan is a writer, journalist, poet, and teacher who resides in Cummington, Massachusetts. His latest novel, KEW, the Nepal Maoist Strain, is his fifth book. It follows, The Tiger's Shadow, a novella (2001) about stalking a notorious terrorist patterned after Osama bin Laden. His other works include another novel, Khmer Rouge End Game (1998), and two books of non-fiction, Bangladesh 2000: On the Brink of Civil War, and China Daily: Between the Lines (1995).

Ryan has spent more than 10 years traveling and working in Asia, most recently in troubled South Asia. His latest novel was inspired by a trip to Nepal in 2000/2001. In 1999, he conducted journalism workshops in Bangladesh for the Bangladesh Centre for development, Journalism, and Communications. Prior to that (1995-96), he taught professional journalists in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam for the Indochina Media Memorial Foundation.

His teaching in Asia has fallen under two different fellowships awarded by the Knight International Press Fellowship Program, administered by the International Center for Journalists in Washington, D.C. It also includes two years (1993-94) working in China as a "foreign expert."

A former Fulbright scholar to Japan (1988-89) and a graduate of Harvard University, Ryan has worked for The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, The Boston Globe, and Reuters news agency. He also has served as Editor of two magazines, Oceanus, published by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, and The Drama Review out of New York University.

Ryan also is a founding member of the Church Hill Poets group in West Cummington, Massachusetts. His poems have been published in several magazines and one anthology. Visit Paul online at http://www.booksonasia.com/

 

 

Pageonelit.com: Where did you grow up and was reading and writing a part of your life? Who were your earliest influences and why?

Paul Ryder Ryan: I grew up in Rye, an affluent gray flannel commuter suburb north of New York City on Long Island Sound, where I played third base instead of catcher. I knew by the age of seventeen that I wanted to be a writer, perhaps a novelist, poet, or playwright. Instead, I became a tender journalist on the road at night in the Hemingway and Fitzgerald tradition. Some nights I was the only white bloke in Small's Paradise in Harlem. I, too, saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by the madness of the Korean War. My catch-22 was that I volunteered for that conflict and was promptly dispatched to Paris where I sported an early green beret and taught French airmen the wonders of the B-26 for use in Indochina, all to the music of Sidney Bechet and Louie the First Armstrong. If you have to ask why, you'll never understand it. It was just the jazz of my day.

 

Pageonelit.com: Why did you write THE TIGER'S SHADOW? Where did this story come from? Was this book written prior to or following 9-11?

Paul Ryder Ryan: I wrote THE TIGER'S SHADOW nearly a year prior to 9/11. The idea for the story grew out of my experience teaching journalism to professionals in Bangladesh under a fellowship granted by the Knight Foundation. At the time, there were a good many Bengal tigers, perhaps as many as 450, prowling in the Sundarban mangrove forests of that country, snacking on woodcutters and honey collectors. Osama bin Laden had already been elevated to America's public enemy number one. But where exactly was he? As Bangladesh is a Muslim country with a sizeable number of terrorists of its own, I decided, with apologies to Tom Clancy and Joseph Conrad, to spirit Osama in my mind from Afghanistan to the Sundarbans where two assassins with links to the Kennedy murders would attempt to hunt him down in his new refuge in South Asia's heart of darkness. I borrowed from Herman Melville and also created an albino tiger that joins in this hunt for evil.

 

Pageonelit.com: What are your feelings on 9-11 and do you feel Osama bin Laden is dead or alive?

Paul Ryder Ryan: I feel that 9/11 was an immense tragedy, the result of misguided foreign policy on the part of the United States. It was, as the CIA has termed it, "blowback" time. In my view, while the U.S. has had many commendable humanitarian responses to crises around the world, it also has promulgated a policy of exploitation. In Bangladesh, for example, it is all about natural gas, the main resource of that country, and who controls and profits from it. This colonialist policy has fostered a lot of hatred, toward the U.S. and Americans in general, around the world.
Osama, while perhaps dead, is never-the-less alive in the public mind as the architect of 9/11. Either way, he is a martyr, and a symbol of terrorism in our time, the leading contender for the anti-Christ of the 21st century.

 

Pageonelit.com: Briefly explain your novel KEW, THE NEPAL MAOIST STRAIN. How was this novel inspired by your travels to Nepal?

Paul Ryder Ryan: KEW, THE NEPAL MAOIST STRAIN is a romance set against the background of the "People's War" currently raging in Nepal. The tale 'hinges on a bioterrorism plot against the United States and involves an American woman caught up in the communist revolution and a state department human rights observer. The day I arrived in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, for a trekking vacation four students were shot and killed on the streets by the police during demonstrations downtown. My taxi couldn't even reach my hotel because of roadblocks and I had to find an alternative one to the one I had reservations at. My journalistic instincts immediately suggested a novel was at hand. Nepal, a largely Hindu nation of Buddhist mantras, is an extraordinary place to visit. Everest aside, one is on the one hand transported back into the Sixth Century by the World Heritage architecture and on the other into the Las Vegas of the Himalayas, with Kathmandu having five casinos. But the little known seven-year-old People's War in the communist kingdom to this point has claimed more than 4,500 lives. The Maoists are fighting to oust the monarchy and end the feudal conditions in the poverty-stricken nation, which relies on trekkers and mountain climbing tourists for a large measure of its revenue. For me, there were parallels in my mind to the Spanish Civil War.

 

Pageonelit.com: You are a 'foreign expert' on China -- hence your book CHINA DAILY: BETWEEN THE LINES (written in 1995). If you were to add chapters to that book today, what would they be and why?

Paul Ryder Ryan: There are signs in China today that the government is losing strict control over print journalism, particularly in the business sector, as it has insisted that magazines and newspapers must pay their way and no longer rely on subsidies. But self-censorship where political news is concerned is still the practice of the day. The media, by and large, is still the mouthpiece of the government and is not likely to change much despite a desire by some editors for a loosening of government controls. The daily party line is somewhat frayed and I would be interested in assessing the magnitude of China's huge "floating population"-those out of work in a land where there is supposedly no unemployment. I also would add material on the country's Muslim unrest.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: Being an experienced published author - What advice can you offer for those writers who are working on their first book?

Paul Ryder Ryan: Adopt a Nike attitude and just do it and keep on truck'in.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: What has been your feedback from readers? What do they say to you about their interpretations of your books?

Paul Ryder Ryan: In general, the response has been positive. After KHMER ROUGE END GAME, a novel about the last days of the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, came out, I got a phone call from a professor at Yale who said he was the central character and that the book was a "hoot." We had never met. Also, a fond mistress used the occasion to tell me she was breaking off the relationship because of the way I had portrayed her in the book. She had never entered my mind while writing the book.

Pageonelit.com: Who are your favorite writers and why?

Paul Ryder Ryan: Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Conrad, Mellville, Steinbeck, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett and Mailer. Because like Everest, they represented the peaks of literature to me, mountains to conquer and learn from the climb.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: What's next?

Paul Ryder Ryan: If not death, a blockbuster best seller.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: What was the last book you read?

Paul Ryder Ryan: KEW, THE NEPAL MAOIST STRAIN. In general, I don't read books anymore because I'm too busy writing them.

 

 

Pageonelit.com: Do you have any hobbies? What are they? How do they enhance your writing.

Paul Ryder Ryan: Chess. Traveling. One sharpens my writing, the other feeds it.