Brian Wilson holds a copy of his memoir, ‘Climbing Clouds: An Immigrant’s American Story,’ in his home office with Kindle Direct Publishing displayed on his computer. Photo by Brian Wilson
Brian Wilson thought he was making one more family photo book.
The Eden Prairie resident had been paging through the albums he and his wife, Melissa, put together after big trips with their three sons when questions about his childhood began surfacing at holiday gatherings.
“They know very little or nothing of my childhood,” Wilson said. “So I thought I’d put together another little album with a little bit of writing to sort of tell my story.”
What began as captions quietly grew into something else. Over nearly three years, the retired software engineer and immigrant from India turned that small project into a memoir, “Climbing Clouds: An Immigrant’s American Story,” which he recently self-published through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform.
“I’ve never written before,” he said. “I’ve only done professional writing for emails and little executive summaries. So this was something entirely new for me.”
From the ‘blue mountains’ to Moorhead
Wilson, 61, grew up in the Nilgiri “blue mountains” of southern India, roughly 5,500 feet above sea level. In the 1970s and early 1980s, he attended school in a community influenced by Western missionaries from New Zealand, Australia and England.
His family’s background — like his name — reflects the region’s Portuguese and Catholic heritage. In that stretch of coastal India, surnames like Pinto, De Souza and De Silva are common, and boys named Brian are not unusual.
After high school, he enrolled in a college program that held no appeal for him.
“I was never going to be good at it,” he said. “I was just taking tests and passing.”
His father urged him to think bigger — even across the world — and pushed him in the mid-1980s to pursue studies in the United States.
“He was asking me to come to the United States, saying, ‘You don’t mess up on this chance,’” Wilson said. “By that time, in the ’80s, the United States was the place to come to.”
With no internet and international calls costing several dollars a minute, he mailed his applications by hand. He chose Moorhead State University (now Minnesota State University Moorhead) because he could cover part of the first year’s tuition and room and board and hoped to earn the rest through on-campus work.
Wilson also changed direction, choosing the then-emerging field of computer science.
“I thought I was pretty good at solving puzzles and logical stuff,” he said. “I figured this would be a good degree for me.”
Tragedy and the long road through school
Six months after his arrival in Minnesota, tragedy struck. In India, his father and brother were in a collision with a bus. His father died. His brother survived after months in the hospital and multiple surgeries.
“Not only was I pretty young at that time, but he was sort of my little place to go to when I had problems,” Wilson said of his father.
Wilson flew home — and paid another cost. At his small university, key classes were offered only every other year, and missing one quarter knocked him out of sequence.
“It gave me some challenges in graduating on time,” he said.
He eventually finished, taking far more credits than planned and working through grief largely on his own, in a pre-social-media era.
“It was really challenging at that time,” he said.
Building a career — and a life — in Minnesota
After graduate school, Wilson landed a job at Great Plains Software in Fargo.
“Serendipity, I think, put me in that place at that time,” he said. Great Plains sponsored his green card and gave him a place to grow professionally.
After nearly eight years in Fargo-Moorhead, he moved to the Twin Cities, working at West Publishing in Eagan and later at Seagate. He and Melissa married during this period, sold his Inver Grove Heights condo and settled in Eden Prairie.
“It just seemed like a really good place to bring up a family, set roots,” he said.
They have lived in Eden Prairie about 25 years. Their sons attended the district’s Spanish immersion program and graduated from Eden Prairie High School. Rahul, 24, works in orthotics and prosthetics. Identical twins Ashwin and Rohit, 21, are seniors at Iowa State University studying finance.
From left: Ashwin, Melissa, Rahul, the family dog Leo, Rohit, and Brian Wilson at their Eden Prairie home. Photo courtesy of Brian Wilson
Health setbacks and a new kind of work
Wilson spent decades writing code, often logging 60- or 70-hour weeks. A later position at Hollander, a Minnesota company owned by a private equity firm, ended in layoffs during 2020-21 as work shifted to Mexico.
At the same time, Wilson was facing serious health challenges. He has multiple sclerosis — a slowly progressive form — and spinal stenosis, a narrowing of the spinal canal that compresses the spinal cord and affects his ability to walk.
“There are times I face-planted into the bushes in front of my house,” he said of the years before his diagnosis. “A couple times I fell down the stairs and thought I just slipped.”
Today, he can no longer run or play the sports he once loved. Walks are shorter and punctuated with rest.
“I used to be a very active person,” he said. “Now I try to take short walks and sort of lean into what I can do now.”
After leaving full-time work in his mid-50s, he decided he no longer wanted to sit in front of a screen. He learned woodturning, pyrography (wood-burning art) and leatherwork, making bags and other items he often gives away.
Recovery from surgeries left him sitting for long stretches — and his fingers free.
“I used a lot of that to do a lot of writing,” he said. “I could only move my fingers on a keyboard, and moving was causing a lot of pain, but it also helped me focus.”
Writing for his sons — and beyond
He began outlining chapters and themes, writing in fragments whenever ideas surfaced.
“Writing a book is quite different from reading a book,” he said. “You have to write it in a way that people want to read it.”
For almost the entire three-year process, he kept the project quiet — even from his mother, now 82.
“I didn’t want to tell them that I’m writing a book and then not be able to finish it,” he said.
He spent months assembling photographs — including pre-digital prints — into chronological albums so he could reconstruct his life story. Only after his draft was nearly complete did he bring in help: Melissa with chronology and edits, and her cousin, an elementary school teacher, with grammar, pacing and structure.
“There’s a whole process to it,” he said. “Things like not revealing certain things ahead of time, aligning things chronologically a little differently.”
He learned the technical side of self-publishing through Kindle Direct Publishing, formatting chapters and designing a cover. The front cover shows Wilson carrying one of his sons on a trail near Walker, Minnesota. The back uses clouds cropped from a family photo taken in the Netherlands.
He chose “Climbing Clouds” as a metaphor for his path.
“I grew up in very rural settings in India,” he said. “From there, you slowly broaden your horizons. I found myself slowly lifting myself from those footpaths to slightly higher ground. Then I went to college. Then I take this enormous plane halfway around the world. Climbing clouds was sort of a metaphor for getting to a better place.”
Lessons in assimilation and meaning
Wilson wrote the book for his sons — but hopes others may see part of their own story in it.
He draws a sharp contrast between India’s checklist-driven culture and what he calls the American impulse to pause and savor milestones.
“In India, it was always chasing — the next job, the next title, the next salary,” he said. “Whereas in my life, I realized those were not the important things. It was important that I do something meaningful. I do something that maybe makes a difference in someone else’s life.”
He also writes about assimilation — learning the language, embracing traditions and raising children he calls “true and through American,” even as they carry Indian first names and family history.
“I think I’ve accomplished that,” he said. “A lot of people helped me do that.”
The later chapters wrestle with illness, loss and choice.
“I went through a whole process, trying to figure out, do I want to be depressed and hang on to what was in the past, or do I keep thinking of how do I adjust and keep living to the fullest?” he said. “I think I tried to bring that out in my book.”
He is proud of the result — but modest.
“I don’t claim to be a pro — I guess I’ll find out from others,” he said with a soft laugh. “But from the little reviews I’ve had back from people, I feel like I did a decent job.”
He hopes to write another book someday, though he does not yet know what it will be.
For now, Wilson is grateful that one reader in particular finally has it in her hands: his mother in India. He had hoped to finish the book in time for her 82nd birthday in August, but publication came a few days later. He eventually sent her a signed copy through a friend.
“I think she really appreciates that even though I live here, my sons are here, and they know very little about India, I took the effort to tell my story,” he said. “So it’s there for them to look over.”