Lisa Heathfield

Lisa Heathfield

About Author

Lisa lives in Brighton with her husband and three sons. Before becoming a mum, she was a secondary school English teacher and loved inspiring teenagers to read.

After teaching, she ran a cafe in Brighton for seven years. In the middle of the general chaos of her lovely children, baking for the cafe and stumbling through running her own business, she wrote her first novel.

Interview

SEED

PUBLISHED BY ELECTRIC MONKEY

APRIL 2015


SEED, the debut novel by LISA HEATHFIELD, explores the idea of power and the abuse of power by taking us into a fictional cult called Seed in which the followers worship the ideal of nature.

The small community is separated from the outside world, avoiding modern technology and science in favour of a lifestyle that is governed by natural cycles and seasons. The followers are lead by 'Papa S' who is given a god-like status within their paternalistic community.

Pearl, who is 15, has always lived at Seed and is happy until a family of 'outsiders' arrive and teenaged Ellis begin to question the rules she and her community live by. Gradually, Pearl's naivity is stripped back until she, too, begins to see a darker side to life at Seed and to question the rules she has always lived by.

We asked author and former teacher Lisa Heathfield to tells us more about her writing and how Seed came about.


Q: You previously worked as an English teacher at a secondary school; what made you become a writer?

A: I had decided when I was quite young that I wanted to teach hearing impaired children after I had found out about Helen Keller, the blind, deaf and mute woman, but first I needed to work for two years in a mainstream school. I trained in Exeter and worked at a school in Brighton. Then my husband and I decided to run a cafe. We had three small children at the time and it was really, really hard.

But what I had always wanted to be was a writer. When I was at school I did work experience as a journalist and I wrote my first book when I was nine years old. I even called myself a writer, although I had never been published, and then a friend of mine said, why don't you just try to write 500 words a day as a New Year resolution and that's what I did.

I found that 500 words a day isn't very much, it's just half an hour or a couple of pages each evening. The first book I wrote nearly got published but wasn't in the end, and then I started to write Seed.


Q: Why did you want to write for teenagers?

A: Writing for teenagers felt very natural to me. I had read a lot of YA fiction when I was training to be a teacher; we had to read one or two YA books each week as part of the course, so I had a feel for what was expected and for the standard of publishing in this area.

There are so many brilliant books out there and as a teacher, I shared many of them with my students. I like the directness of YA writing and that it feels so genuine and not pretentious.


Q: What is your starting point for your stories?

A: For me, it's the character. I was actually writing another book when Pearl, the main character in Seed, appeared to me. I remember vividly her looking at me and telling me I should be writing her story and when I did so, her story arrived almost already formed.

I wrote her story in the first person because when I am writing, I become the person I am writing about - to me, Pearl is a real person.

I don't plot what I write, I just pick up my pen and zone out. I write my books longhand and type them up afterwards and what you read is largely my first draft of the book, although I did do some work on Seed with my agent and my editor.


Q: Why did you decide to feature a cult in Seed?

A: I didn't make a conscious decision to write about a cult, I just knew that Pearl lived in a cult straight away.

I've had an interest in cults in the past. I remember watching a documentary on cults, years ago, and I have used part of what happened in the Jonestown cult for Seed. That was a massive cult that lived separately from the modern world but in the end, their leader made everyone drink poison and commit mass suicide, even the children.

I wondered how someone had managed to twist people's minds so much that they believed the right thing to do was to feed poison to their children? How can someone have that much charisma to develop that kind of power over other people?

I remember once hearing about a teenager who lived locally and who belonged to a cult. When the cult 'leader' said that its members were not allowed to hold anything that someone from the outside had handed to them, she had to leave her job at the hairdresser.

I find the idea of total control like that incredible but if someone had lived inside a cult all their lives, they will believe it is the right way to live. Even those who come into cults from the outside are often very vulnerable and they give themselves freely, like some of the characters in my book.


Q: Why did you decide to focus this cult, Seed, on nature?

A: It was important to me that the cult is not a religious one; I am a religious person so I didn't want to make that the focus of the cult. When you read Seed you'll find there are no references to God, not even characters saying 'oh my god'.

I decided instead to base the cult on a love of nature and I suppose that comes from me, I'm a real environmentalist but that's not to say I'd want to live at Seed; it's the values of nature that I believe in.

Seed has to be made attractive for for people to want to join and to stay there although I think that that also makes it more sinister because of what we find buried underneath the day to day life.


Q: What kinds of questions were raised for you in writing about a cult like this?

A: If you look at other cults like the Amish community which also believes in living a natural life, the followers tend to be very happy (although the Amish have a much bigger community than Seed). So I think we also have to ask, if people do want to live life cut off from the outside world, is that such a bad thing?

At what point does it become wrong to live in a community if the people in control are basically doing good things but are still controlling people and telling them what they can and can't do? If a group of adults are saying, we are enjoying living away from the modern world, then are we in a position to say that that is not okay?

There are lots of other questions raised in the book, too, like the abuse of power by adults and the danger of secrets.


Q: The world you conjure in Seed is very appealing; do you like the idea of a world without technology and did that make it easier for you to envisage the setting?

A: I would personally love to live in a world where we didn't have all this modern technology, my brain shuts down when it comes to 'phones and computers. I would love to be able to go to Seed for the holidays, swim in the lake and walk in the woods, although I live in a city and have always thought of myself as a city girl. But we've recently been to Scotland and I loved the lack of people and the mountains.


Q: Do you plan to revisit Pearl's story with a sequel?

A: Although I wrote Seed as a stand-alone book, I am now looking into a follow-up but I have found that it's much harder to write a second book because there is more expectation. Having said that, I have begun it and really enjoyed meeting Pearl again.


Q: How does life as an author compare with your other careers?

A: Life as an author is blissful! I wake up with my boys, take them to school, wash up and then I write. I don't procrastinate when I'm writing; I'm more likely to get obsessive about what I'm writing and to not be able to think of anything else.

I write for four or five hours and can sometimes find myself with an empty cup and plate so I know I've had lunch but I've been so absorbed by my story that I can't remember actually eating lunch. So I can't think of anything better than sitting with a pen and paper and a cup of tea and just writing!

Author's Titles