Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, 11 October 2011

NOVELIST Lesley Glaister spotted several published and many unpublished writers in the audience for her reading from her novel Chosen – her psychological thriller about religious cults and what happens when a family member joins a sect.

This set the theme for her presentation, organised by Orkney Arts Society, which focussed on her author’s journey while writing the novel. The creation of the novel is a typical example of how writers are often blind to their own experiences. Glaister had the idea that the subject of a person becoming a member of a cult, and particularly the effect of this on the family left behind, would make a great subject for a thriller. She set about finding out more about the psychology of a person who is drawn into a cult.

Lesley Glaister (photo by Catherine Turnbull)

She knew her protagonist would be a woman aged about 30 and a male member of the family would join the religious sect – maybe a father or a brother. It is funny how writers make these decisions, she said, especially as she later remembered that one of her own brothers was involved in The Divine Light Mission when she was a young teenager.

She visited him in his Ashram and she used memories of this and later conversations about how it had affected him to research the novel. One of her most vivid is that all the people who were members of the cult were “glazey-eyed and blissed out”.

She never stayed around to find out why this happened after people were initiated. It was thrilling to be among people who all had one purpose and was almost tempted to go through with the ceremony. Somehow she had forgotten all about this episode in her life.

Through these memories she invented the Soul-Life church in the USA for Chosen. The novel begins when Dodie’s younger brother, Seth, only 16, has gone to New York, supposedly to stay with relatives. But Dodie is alerted that something else is going on when a letter from Seth is addressed from the Soul-Life commune in New York State.

Glaister’s reading described Dodie’s visit to the commune and first meeting with cult members with its sinister undertones.

The author felt the story was flimsy, with too many stereotypes, so she shifted to tell the back story of how her imagined cult began. She drew on her early experiences on the fringes of her brother’s hippy kingdom.

In this central section we meet the hippy Bogart, who looked like “Jesus or Cat Stevens”. The reading took us back to a party in a squat in 1974 which was so convincing that one audience member who was born well after the 1970s felt she had travelled back in time to that place.

As someone who was around then I wondered if Glaister and I had been to the same party. Once the back story had been told the rest of the book flowed to its dramatic and tragic conclusion.

Glaister teaches creative writing at the University of St Andrews. The following day she led a writing workshop in Kirkwall Library, taking participants with eyes closed to observe and describe objects and atmosphere using all the senses. Her visit to Orkney, where she and husband Andrew Greig have a house, was of great value to the islands’ writing community.

© Catherine Turnbull, 2011