john scott ridgway/ who I am

 John Scott Ridgway writes from the borderlands — the place where satire becomes scripture, where politics mutates into myth, where the ordinary world cracks open and reveals its strange machinery. For more than twenty‑five years he has written as if the stakes were spiritual, producing over a million words across novels, blogs, and performance pieces that blur the line between confession, prophecy, and dark comedy.

He is the author of One War, Waking Up Jesus, The Collected Writing of John Scott Ridgway, and the infamous The Religious Psycho Killer’s Shit List, a book so strange and sharp it drew blurbs from Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. His short fiction — including the hit story “Fuentes’ Last Hit” — appears on Vocal, where readers follow him for his blend of grit, vision, and emotional candor.

Ridgway emerged during the early Blog Wars, when the internet still felt like a frontier and words could tilt the world. A Democratic Socialist with a performer’s instinct, he wrote with the urgency of someone who believed language could still change things — and sometimes it did. His blogs (Shattered Present, Elves Attic, Waking Up Jesus, and others) became gathering places for readers who sensed that beneath the satire was a deeper ache: a search for meaning in a collapsing age.

He carried that same energy into the live‑literature world, founding The Elves Attic, a reading series that felt less like an event and more like a séance — a room where stories were spoken as if they were spells. The series moved from It’s A Secret Bar in Roscoe Village to The Big Star Café, gathering writers, wanderers, and the curious into its orbit.

Ridgway’s improvisational life runs parallel to his literary one. Trained by one of the founders of Chicago’s improv movement, he learned to slip between characters like changing masks. In 2006 he created Peace and Pipedreams, one of the earliest proto‑podcasts, performing more than fourteen characters in a single show. His stoner mystic Moobong Haze became a cult figure, the kind of character who feels like he wandered in from another dimension. Film offers flickered, then vanished — as they often do — but the myth of the show endured.

Educated in poetry at the University of Toledo, fiction at Columbia College Chicago, and anthropology, sociology, history, and philosophy at Northeastern Illinois University, Ridgway writes with the mind of a scholar and the instincts of a street‑corner storyteller. His work is restless, haunted, and humane — always reaching toward the possibility that stories might still save us, or at least remind us who we are.