Biography

Brian Mandabach spent the first 18 years of his life on the swampy shore of Bakers Lake, forty miles northwest of Chicago. Thankfully, he got out in the canoe a lot, instead of spending his entire childhood eating Cap’n Crunch and watching re-runs of Speed Racer.

Also thankfully, the house was full of books. His favorites were “the Laura and Mary books,” (his family’s name for the “Little House” series) which they read together after dinner, and which he read on his own, over and over again.

Though he wrote stories, plays, and poems, young Mandabach wanted to be a chef like his big brother. Restaurant work sustained him as he earned an English degree at Colorado College, dabbled in song and short fiction writing (with publications in Leviathan, Colages and Bricollages, and Cattails), and squandered his 20’s playing and singing with his college band.

After the band busted up, Mandabach was waiting tables and having a hard time avoiding the feeling that he needed a real job. A regular customer at his granola restaurant in Boulder (where he also waited on Allen Ginsberg and Robert Redford) invited him to visit her creative writing class at Boulder High School. Talking with teenagers about books and writing was almost as much fun as playing loud music, so he ended up with a teaching license and a career.

After he’d been teaching for a while, Mandabach joined the Master of Arts in Teaching program, again at Colorado College, where he met the eminent natural history writer Ann Haymond Zwinger. He convinced her to be his thesis advisor, and she taught him just enough to make his marginal talents a danger to himself and others.

Newly inspired by nature writing, he began producing Lay of the Land, a public radio program featuring readings by Wendell Berry, Terry Tempest Williams, and Barbara Kingsolver. Lay of the Land aired on grassroots radio from Washington State to New Hampshire. At the same time, Mandabach’s articles and essays appeared regularly in The Colorado Springs Independent.

When a teenaged girl in his neighborhood took her own life, Mandabach found himself haunted by her—or by the idea of her—and by that unanswerable “why?” He didn’t actually know her, and consciously steered away from learning more about her as he began to develop the character that became Cassie and the novel that became Or Not. Getting to know teenagers through years of teaching and sponsoring writing and reading clubs helped Mandabach create the characters of his novel. His profound sense of place—inspired by his youth and made literate by his background in natural history—also informs Or Not, especially Cassie and her family.

Mr. Mandabach continues to teach writing and literature to 8th graders in lovely Colorado Springs, where he lives with his bibliophilic wife, daughter, and son, who do not approve of the hours he spends blogging, chatting on myspace, and updating www.mandabach.com. But though he doesn’t get out the old fly rod as much as he’d like, he still manages to make time to wade in Bear Creek with the kids, chasing water bugs and getting wistful over the occasional flash of a trout.