A science geek at heart, Scott earned a bachelor degree in neurobiology from the University of Virginia, and his creative drive is rooted in a fascination with brain science. His writing often reflects a curiosity in neurologically-plausible aberrations, absurdities, or possibilities in perception, consciousness, and the experience of time. The story seed for St. Ulphia’s Dead though was formed when he stumbled upon the existence of “culture-bound disorders,” psychological disorders completely rooted to specific locales, and otherwise unreproducible.
Scott has been active in a variety of creative media. He toured the Midwest with a progressive rock band, co-founded the indie press Omnibucket.com, through which he produced limited edition multimedia books and, after moving to the San Francisco Bay Area, co-hosted the Action Fiction! performance series that brought local fiction to life with theatre performers.
In 2012, he completed his MFA from San Francisco State University, where he received the Miriam Ylvisaker Fellowship and three literary awards. Stories of his have appeared in Slice, Fence, Cafe Irreal, and other journals. He’s been a finalist for the Halifax Prize and the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, and in 2021 his short story “Blind Sticks” was nominated for a Pushcart award.
In 2024, he took part in a 100 Day Creative Challenge to get more comfortable illustrating his own prose, and discovered his voice as an offbeat irreverent cartoonist through creating a series of 100 story panels – single-sentence stories with hand-illustrated scenes built around a central character, SANA – each of which strives to exemplify the singular theme of “sweet, paradoxical, and full of vague menace.” Read them all at https://www.instagram.com/slambridis/.
He’s an avid reader, with a goal of at least 52 books per year. He annually publishes his top 10 of the year at Eiger, Mönch & Jungfrau. This year, he also completed a 6-year around-the-world reading journey to complete a book from every country of the world — all 199 of them (2 of which were formed after beginning).
Professionally (a.k.a. the day job), Scott leads the design department at Blink, a user experience design consulting firm, headquartered in Seattle. The tale he often tells to reconcile the dual identities of designer and writer, is that the best designers inhabit the minds of those they design for. But that is just a story. The true impact on his writing is that, not unlike Kafka, his job requires he observe the machinations of modern America through its investment in digital products and services, and the massive agglomeration of consumers and workers it’s created. If this is all an absurd fabrication, then what else might be too? And what, leftover, is actually and ineffably important?
Scott’s beloved wife Angie, a visual artist, chef, permaculturalist, and all-around magical fairy keeps him honest by challenging him to recognize his place in those machinations whenever he seems too comfortable.
Born and raised in New York, Scott has moved steadily westward. After a decade in the Bay Area with his wife, he spent a year in Lyon, France with their 1-year-old daughter Isabelle, writing St. Ulphia’s Dead during her naps on a bench facing the Soane between two Renaissance churches. They spent the COVID years on a 40-acre farm in the Tahoe foothills caring for 400 olive trees and a menagerie of critters. In 2022, they left California and agrarian life behind for delightful Bellingham, WA, the “city of subdued excitement,” and would gladly share tales of farm life follies with anyone interested.
But probably the most surprising thing people learn about him is that when he was 14, his best friend shot him in the face with a bb gun, and it took another 15 years for him to find out from his dentist that the bb was still embedded in his nose, clear as ice in the x-ray, which is the current background image on his Facebook profile. And yes, it’s still there.
