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Like many Peninsula kids, Amanda Glaze was intrigued from an early age by the South Bay’s sprawling Victorian Winchester Mystery House, with its reputation for paranormal activity, odd architectural features and legends about former owner Sarah Winchester. Some have said that the widowed Winchester, possibly advised by a medium, was compelled to obsessively keep building in order to appease and host the spirits of those killed by Winchester rifles.
“On the other hand, there’s a potential theory that Sarah Winchester designed it herself and was a simply really bad architect,” Glaze said with a laugh. “We simply don’t know. As a writer, that’s the best thing we can hope for because it gives it that what-if factor.”
What if, she wondered, the legends were true? And what if Sarah Winchester had descendents living in the mansion and whatever haunted her back then “still haunted that house to this day?” Glaze, who grew up in Mountain View and Los Altos and now lives in Los Angeles, was inspired by Winchester, her infamous house and the mythology surrounding them when writing her newest young adult novel, “The Lies of Alma Blackwell.”
Glaze’s book is set in the fictional California town of Hollow Cliff, dominated by the “Blackwell House of Spirits,” where the Blackwell family has lived for generations and which, along with the town, has become a tourist attraction. Seventeen-year-old Nev is expected to soon succeed her grandmother as the town’s sworn protector, a tradition that started with Alma Blackwell, Nev’s ancestor, who vowed to keep the vengeful ghosts said to be menacing Hollow Cliff at bay. Nev is poised to do her family duty, but the arrival of Cal, a young man who takes a job as a Blackwell House tour guide and seems to have knowledge Nev doesn’t – including about the disappearance of her mother years before – throws everything she thought she knew about her family legacy into question.
“I’m a wimp when it comes to jump scares and horror and a lot of blood but I really like a spooky, mysterious vibe,” said Glaze, whose previous novel, “The Second Death of Edie and Violet Bond,” also delves into the world of the spirits. “You don’t know who to trust, everybody has a secret, everybody’s lying, you’re constantly a little bit off kilter … That’s the vibe that I like best,” she said.
When coming up with her books’ more magical elements, “It’s hard to say exactly what inspired them,” Glaze said. “I’m always reading almanacs and about herbs, and I read every witchy book in existence … I always think about historic ‘witches,’ who were often midwives and healers.”
The Blackwell women use charms made of everyday trinkets and tidbits to weave their spells, with Nev able to tune in to each item’s unique vibrations.
“That was something I really wanted in this book, for this to feel like this is our world but it’s tinged with magic,” she said. The ordinary “feels sacred if you look at it in the right way.”
While the book deals with the supernatural, most readers can no doubt relate to the pressure Nev feels to live up to family demands.
“‘How do you embrace your true self when you’re struggling under the weight of family expectations? It can feel like an actual curse that is weighing on you,” Glaze said. In Nev’s case, of course, the curse is more literal. “It was my way of exploring how it feels to grow up with those kinds of expectations from your family and how you can work through them and embrace your own life path and deal with them as a young person,” she said.
Nev has a faithful feline, Tabitha, who serves as an “externalization of Nev’s instincts” as she’s torn between trusting her gut and believing what she’s been told. “Animals can sense things on a level that humans can’t,” Glaze, who usually has her own two cats by her side as she writes, said. Plus, “this book has some darker themes. I wanted to add something that brings a lot of joy and happiness, and for me, that’s cats.”
Glaze said she never expected to become an author, but she does have a long history of loving books. A self-described “theater kid” growing up, the Los Altos High School grad loved doing plays with Los Altos Youth Theater. Perhaps not surprisingly, “my favorite ones were all the literary ones,” she said, as she recalled playing heroines such as Jo March, Mary Lennox, Jane Eyre and Anne Shirley. “Obviously the book writer was already coming out, I just didn’t know it yet,” she said. “I eventually got to play all of my favorite book characters.”Â
As a teen, Glaze worked at Linden Tree Books, which “gave me confidence in terms of reading and interacting with readers,” she said, thankful to the store’s former owners for encouraging her. “It’s an experience that stayed with me.” As a bookseller, she enjoyed recommending young adult and middle grade books to customers. “I’ve always loved coming-of-age stories,” she said. “They tend to end with hope, even if it’s a dystopian story where the world is falling apart. (The characters) are starting to discover who they are in relation to the world.”
Glaze headed south to UCLA for college, where she studied theater, with a focus on directing. There she found a knack for working with new playwrights, helping them shape their work and bring stories to fruition. She then embarked on a career in the film and television industry as a producer and developer, working on projects including “The Big Sick” and the documentaries “The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling” and “George Carlin’s American Dream,” both of which won Emmy Awards.
“To be a producer, it’s a very specific skill set. It requires filtering your opinions through many things,” she said, including the visions and goals of the writers, the production company and the studio. Much as she likes helping others tell stories, “There was a time I asked myself, ‘What would I do?’ I felt like I had lost touch with that a little bit as a creative person.”
Interested in telling stories of her own, she started taking weekend writing classes, with no aspirations for anything other than having some fun exploring her creative side. She soon was hooked, and undertook an MFA program in writing for children and young adults from Hamline University. Friends suggested she submit what became her first book to agents and the rest, as they say, is history.
For her next project, she’s considering something set in the United Kingdom in the Dark Ages, for which she’s currently doing research. “It’s shaping up to be a witchy, feminist Arthurian story,” she said.
Returning to Linden Tree as an author, which she’s done to celebrate the publications of both her books thus far, “is up there with the coolest parts of writing a book,” she said. “It was very special, to go back there and see booksellers I had worked with and who remembered me; a very full-circle moment.”
More information is available at amandaglaze.com.
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