Growing up in a Mormon family of six in Ohio was about as idyllic for Brian Udall as it sounds, but he broke away from organized religion at the age of 14. By the time he left home at the age of 17, the pastoral naivete that modern religion seems so fond of had dissolved and morphed into what would become a lifelong obsession with the question of authority, truth, and the metaphysics of meaning.

The first time he went to college was for film, but he didn’t make it even one semester before dropping out and driving 30 hours straight with three friends from Utah all the way to New York where the Occupy Wall Street movement was in full swing. The odd, media-hungry behavior of the organizers struck the young teenager as self-serving and manipulative which left a bad taste in his mouth. Even still, he participated in a four person hunger strike which ultimately landed him in two separate New York jail cells.

When he arrived in the second cell, the three dozen or so men inside were all jostling for a spot on the floor to sleep on. There was only one spot left, beside a short bench where a large man was lying down. The man had a paper milk carton on top of his stomach, held loosely by his bulky left hand. As the man slept, his grip on the milk carton loosened and slipped. Warm prison milk came crashing down on the 17-year old dropout in a wave of dairy and disappointment.

The rest of his young adult life could be described as a series of spilled milks. A second attempt at school at the age of 19, this time in Portland, Oregon for journalism, was interrupted by a medical crisis which took years to recover from. It was probably for the best that he couldn’t finish school there. He’s lived in Portland twice now, for one year stints each, and both were the worst years of his life.

But hope prevails, and he made his way back to Salt Lake City at the age of 20 where he channeled his disillusioned activism into artistic expression. It was shortly after arriving in Utah the second time that he wrote his first book: Dust’s Final Note. It was a messy and pretentious story about a wandering group of young hippies who were chosen by a strange deity to be taught the hidden nature of the universe through psychedelic visions and indelicate sex scenes.

In other words, it was pure hot garbage.

But a book is a book is a book, so they say. It was around this time that he moved out of the menial labor force and into the menial service force, aka waiting tables and slinging drinks. A third attempt at school (this time for the odd and inadvisable plan to get a TEFL certificate so he could travel the world as a wandering bartender) was unfortunately successful. Instead of the French degree he had initially enrolled for, though, he received a BA in International Studies. Which is to say, he got scammed.

While in school in Utah, he started writing articles for SLUG magazine which is an excellent music and local culture magazine. It was largely unpaid, though sometimes he received some free beer or a gift card in return; if the project was big enough. Not that it mattered. He loved it. A deep seated craving for authentic cultural expression was gnawing away at the center of his chest and SLUG mag was one of the first successful attempts to scratch that itch.

Before graduating, he wrote his second book titled Numinous which was unintendedly a semi-autobiographical novel about a music journalist in New York or some such. In the story, the main character has a dream where a beautiful woman can be seen on top of a thorny hill singing a siren’s song. As he approaches, she turns to greet him as she sits naked atop a worn and hollow log. But up from behind her in the sky rises a big, bulging eye which opens its lid and sends out a blinding ray of light, which decimates the woman and wakes him up. The rest of the story is about the main character’s pursuit of the girl, who he sees a picture of in the real world the next day. It ends in yet another hallucinatory burst of light and the reader is left to assume something like the rapture happens for reasons that don’t make much sense.

Numinous was a passable improvement on Dust’s Final Note, to be sure, but it will never see the light of day. Another year of writing tossed into the proverbial trash bin. But you don’t get anywhere if the only step you’re willing to take is the one that gets you to your destination. The tedious and embarrassing journey to the land of creative skill must be made in total or not at all. And so he plodded onward.

His college years had been spiritually quite demanding as a sense of purpose was glaringly absent from his life. He was a drinker and a smoker, always with a pool cue in hand. At the same time, he had Asperger levels of social aptitude and thus remained an outsider in almost all ways. If there were such things as modern hermits living in cities, he likely would have ranked among them.

With no religious purpose to guide him, no social group to contribute to, and no professional setting that could provide meaningful situations in which to act, the universe struck him as cruel and uncaring. The trouble was that he didn’t really feel that way in total. A small little cut at the back of his heart kept pinging, calling him back to something unknown lying hidden just beneath.

The New Age movement became briefly appealing but the love and light attitude that the modern spiritual community is flush with was deeply un-resonant with his own worldview. If the goal was to understand the world, he didn’t feel that you’d get there by ignoring it. But he did pick up meditation and began studying the more historied world religions, particularly Buddhism.

After graduating with a useless and expensive piece of paper, he moved to Austin, Texas at the age of 27. This was early 2020 and the lockdowns from the pandemic were in full swing. The line that this move to Texas demarcates in his life cuts right through the middle of a months-long spiritual experience which can and will carry him through the end of his days. The deep and primal feeling of truly belonging here in the universe which this experience gave him reignited the old religious sentiments that his childhood had brought him, only now he was free from dogmatic answers. Only the questions remained.

Life proceeds in a pattern of breathing. Up and down, in and out. Which is to say that the peak experience did not last and something felt off once more. Which led him to take yet another look at his serpentine life trajectory, ultimately leading to law school. Not seeing a way to exist financially off of his creative talents, he was ready to go full corpo. But the young idealist still remained within his psyche, and so he chose environmental law which brought him back again to Portland at 28.

It had been almost a decade since he had been to Portland but already it had changed so much. We all know the story of the fall of that city and the unaddressed challenges that plague it and other American cities like it. But it was worse, because the city was actively turned against his kind: a Midwestern white guy with a built-in resistance to dogmatic groupthink which was, ironically, borne out of the rejection of his strict religious upbringing.

He had grown up on the progressive left, but his time spent at a Portland law school quickly remedied his utopic idealism. He had initially assumed law school was a place for debate and bold ideas, a place where the best and brightest were sent to spar in intellectual combat. What he found was a system of staff and students who were viscerally opposed to dissenting opinions and a thorough social structure that punished any form of thought crime against it through isolation and public ridicule.

Such is life.

Fearing the very real possibility of unaliving himself if he stayed, he once again dropped out of school and made his way back to the state he grew up in: beautiful, rustic Ohio. It was the third cross-country move he had made in as many years and he’s there yet still.

He now works full time for Static Media as an editor, having worked his way up from a freelance writer-for-hire getting odd jobs online. His first year with Static Media was as a full time writer for Tasting Table, an online food and beverage magazine that operates as a well-structured content mill. He is now an editor for The Takeout, another of Static Media’s brands. Which is great for many reasons, not the least of which is that now he can focus his writing energy on his creative pursuits.

The next book he is working on is called The Furnace and it is set to be published in 2025. The core idea of the book is the nature of suffering for artificial intelligence. A conscious being who doesn’t experience pain or suffering is what humans tend to call a psychopath or a monster. To avoid creating such a beast, the tech executive (and main character) who managed to create the first conscious AI is given the unpleasant governmental directive to teach it how to suffer so that it cares about the consequences of its actions. It’s an ambitious novel that aims to provide an answer to the age-old theological problem of suffering using the thematic story elements of contemporary sci fi.

You can follow Brian Udall on Substack here where he will be sharing a new short story every month.

All of the images you’ll find on this website are 35mm photographs I’ve taken and developed myself. Eventually I may find another use for them, but for now they’re happy to adorn the walls of this website. In case you like photography and are interested, I shot these on an Olympus OM1 which is my first camera and I love it to death. The fact that even a handful of my photos have found a home here could very well lead to more photos getting made down the line.