Welcome!

Welcome to The Bathroom Monologues. My name is John Wiswell. I write short stories, micro-fiction, haiku and the occasional novel. Most of my work is humorous, Fantasy, or both. I graduated from Bennington College and have written for Acorn Press, the Inside Pulse and www.inyourheadonline.com/. I'm an avid reader and always have at least twenty books on my shelves, not just humor and Fantasy, but anything I can enjoy or that will expand my mind - Literature, history, horror, science, science fiction, anthropology, mythology and everything that leads human beings on the search for meaning. I'm a pretty peaceful person, so if I write something ripping into someone, you can bet I'm at least partially joking. My favorite writers are Homer, Mark Twain, J.R.R. Tolkien, Douglas Adams and Stephen King - loving a polytheist, a monotheist, an atheist and two original American nutcases has helped me break down some rather silly stereotypes. If you can't accept that an ideology or a belief won't necessarily make someone good or bad, you probably won't like my writing.

The biggest features of this blog are the eponymous Bathroom Monologues: micro-fiction, list-fiction and micro-prose that I've been rattling off since college. Back in college I had no spare time thanks to an ungodly workload, and was afraid that I was losing my creative imagination to the flood of academic papers I had to write. Any time I got up from the computer to use the bathroom, I improvised a narrative on any topic except what I was working on at the time, to keep the independent part of my brain functioning. So if I was studying the Aroostook War, maybe I'd talk to myself about ghosts in tall grass; if I was studying genes in pea plants, maybe I'd talk to myself about conspiracy theories and twinkies. Sometimes I'd time one up when I returned and IM it to a friend. They made enough people laugh that I started putting them online, and we got to this point. I recommend Bathroom Monologuing to anyone, not only writers. It's a fun exercise, and much better than reading the back of a shampoo bottle. I have over a hundred archived ones I'll slowly be putting up on the site, along with fresh ones.

Another thread of the site will follow any of my writing that is picked up by magazines or publishers. I'm always working on a short story (or this enormous quartet of novels...). If you like The Bathroom Monologues, perhaps you'll pick up a copy of my printed work (and perhaps write a letter to the editor saying how life-affirming John Wiswell's story/haiku/essay was, and how you want more of it, and how they should pay him double the normal fee).

Enjoy your stay!