Mandy achieved her MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific Lutheran University.
She writes fiction, nonfiction, flash fiction, and poetry.

Pizza loving, rain celebrating, flash fiction fanatic.

Mandy was ten years old when she knew she wanted to be a writer. No one is certain if it was multiple viewings of the opening scene in Romancing the Stone back in 1984 where Kathleen Turner played a novelist who not only finishes writing her book and celebrates with her cat by opening a can of tuna while she indulges in the mini airport drinks, or when Mandy discovered Stephen King was a writer-actor-screenwriter and declared she would grow up to be Stephen King. Not like Stephen King, but actually Stephen King. 
Regardless of the origin, Mandy is now a quirky and funny writer who believes you can live in many different perspectives because of fiction’s flexibility.

Her undergrad from Oregon State University is in nutrition with an emphasis on dietetics. She often rebels against her nutrition degree by eating pizza regularly. 
Pizza and Mandy have been synonymous ever since she traveled from Oregon to Massachusetts eating pizza and writing stories inspired by hundreds of thousands of calories. The journey was called “Pizza-Inspired Prose” and when she’s asked what her favorite pizza was from the trip - Mandy can’t stand that her answer is a cliche - but Pizano’s Pizza in Chicago, Illinois was the BEST. That’s right. Chicago-style. John’s Pizzeria in New York City was the runner-up.

Mandy loves pizza and rain in no particular order. Well, rain is actually first, then pizza. Except for when she’s really hungry, then maybe pizza is first and rain takes a backseat. The order is particular at times. Rain on her pizza, however, is never good. But pizza inside while watching the rain is rather lovely.
Mandy obsessively checks her Submittable account and has two collaborations in-progress: one is a collection of her flash fiction with a focus on women and the other is a television pilot screenplay set in the 1990s before the electronic medical record.

 

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

― Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life

Articles about Mandy:

February 2022
“Samaritan Regional Manager Named to Arts Center Board”

Embracing my quirkiness in writing and in life.

Here are some of the weird things I’ve done.

  • Aerobics Instructor

    2002-2009

  • Zillow Pillow Designer

    established 2007

  • Corvallis Fall Festival

    2010

  • The Today Show

    Ambush Makeover June 2011

  • Corvallis Fall Festival

    2011

Background Work

  • Netflix, Trinkets 2

    Summer 2020

  • Amazon, Somebody I Used to Know

    Fall 2022

  • TV Pilot, Rust Belt News

    Forthcoming 2023