When writer Angela Barry returned to Bermuda after years of living abroad she only intended to stay three weeks. That was 17 years ago.

Since then the Bermudian?s writing career has really taken off. She is the author of a short story collection called ?Endangered Species? published by People Tree Press in England, and earlier this year she was awarded the prestigious Charlotte and Isidor Paiewonsky Prize by the University of the Virgin Islands upon the release of the first ever Bermudian edition of The Caribbean Writer anthology.

When the met with Ms Barry at the Bermuda College where she is a senior lecturer in English, she urged other Bermudian writers to aim higher instead of settling for self-publishing venues. ?We have talented writers and artists in Bermuda but they are not as encouraged as they could be,? she said. ?There is not the sense of the seriousness of writing, but I think there should be.?

She said that although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with self-publishing, if a writer really want to be accepted within the literary community they have to put yourself at the mercy of a selection process. ?That is when you don?t self-publish,? she said. ?It is when you get a publishing company to choose your work. There are a lot of misunderstandings there. Many people think that once they have a manuscript and can get together a certain number of thousands of dollars they can get a book.

?They can have a book, but they won?t necessarily have readers. A self-published book also has a very limited space to inhabit, once you have sold it to your friends and relatives.?

Another downside is that self-published books will often be automatically disqualified from literary competitions.

The main difference between a self-published book and a book published by a mainstream press is the amount of editing that goes into the book.

?The editing process is something that stands between you and your work,? she said. ?It is an objective force. You need an objective person to put that more clinical eye on it.

?It is tough to have those eyes on your work, but when you have the editor come in with his cold red pen, and say ?you have submitted 500 pages and this could be said in 150 pages, go back?, that is what the process is about.?

Three of her pieces, one fiction and two non-fiction were published in volume 19 of The Caribbean Writer. She was one of a handful of Bermudians chosen.

?The fact that we had this Bermudian section in volume 19 is important because it puts young Bermudian writers in the way of the whole process of selection and editing,? said Ms Barry.

The Bermudian issue was partly the brainchild of Dr. Kim Dismont Robinson who was at the University of the Virgin Islands at the time. She is now Bermuda?s first Folklife Officer.

?We were all very delighted at how the anthology appeared and the highlighting of Bermuda, and the range of contributions was quite interesting and impressive,? said Ms Barry.

Dr. Robinson wrote the introduction for this edition looking at the question of what is Bermudian culture and writing. Ms Barry said this was a question that often stumped her students.

?I am using Dr. Robinson?s introduction in my classes,? said Ms Barry. ?Whenever I pose the question, the class is reduced to silence. It is quite significant that young Bermudians don?t seem to have an immediate sense of who they are. This particular collection of poems and stories is a good step.?

Dr. Robinson also spearheaded another opportunity for Bermudian writers with the compilation of a Bermudian anthology of poetry that is currently in the works.

Mervyn Morris, poet and retired professor emeritus at the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, has been chosen to editor the poetry anthology. He recently visited Bermuda to help selected poets to workshop their pieces.

In a writer?s workshop, a writing peer group read each other?s work and make positive suggestions about what works and what doesn?t. The group is usually led by a more experienced writer.

?Dr. Morris gave the poets his suggestions,? said Ms Barry. ?Those poems were workshopped thoroughly. That whole process of selection and editing is not something that is understood by a lot of young writers in Bermuda.

?It is important to understand that between the original thought and the final product there is a lot of work to be done.?

Unfortunately, some Bermudian poets or writers don?t edit their work because they believe their inspiration ?comes directly from God and you can?t edit God?s word?.

?Ten years ago, I had a very vibrant and exciting young student who told me he was a poet. I said ?do you read poetry?? He said, ?oh no, I don?t read poetry, it just comes to me?,? she said, laughing. ?I think God is responsible for so many things, but bad writing you really can?t blame on God.

?Writers have to work on whatever it is we have to produce. We must listen to people who have been in the business a long time.

?We don?t necessarily have to agree with them, but we should listen. My hope is that the notion of the standard will have been reinforced by Dr. Morris? visit.?

Ms Barry said that although many fine poets and writers don?t necessarily have literary degrees, it is still important for writers to educate themselves even if it is just by reading work by those who are already established.

If you try to write poetry without reading any, you are ? in Ms Barry?s words ? ?reinventing the wheel?.

?Bermudian writers coming into the field for the first time have to be aware of that,? she said. ?If they are really serious about their work, they have to have the courage to have it assessed by an objective outside body.

?I learned more having had my Endangered Species stories edited, than any number of courses could have taught me. It was a very important learning curve.?

Ms Barry was actually lucky in the publication process. She only sent her Endangered Species manuscript to two different publishers before it was accepted. Some new writers try dozens of publishers before they find a match.

?Once it was taken up by the People Tree Press in Leeds, the editing didn?t take that long,? she said. ?But the actual publication of it was lengthy, much longer than I had hoped for.?

Ms Barry is currently working on her next book which will be a full length novel. She is staying tight-lipped about the subject matter.

?I won?t tell you much but I am hoping to finish it by the end of the summer,? she said. ?Once that is done then my big task will be finding a publisher.

?It is the first novel I have written. I have been drifting toward the novel for a long time. All of my short stories are far too long. I regret to say that the setting is not specifically Bermudian. It is about Bermuda and beyond.?

She said it would be difficult for her to write a book only about Bermuda, because so much of her life has been spent overseas.

?I left here to live for the first time when I was 15 years old,? she said. ?I went to live in England. I became a teacher and taught in various schools in London for over ten years.

?Somewhere between times I spent a couple of years in France as a student. I married a man from Senegal, West Africa. That again pushed the boundaries to another place.

She returned to Bermuda in 1989 because of her father?s ill health. She said one of the difficulties of writing in Bermuda is the isolation from the mainstream writing community. There also isn?t an infrastructure here for writers the way there is for the visual arts.

?I think the experience that the young poets had with Dr. Morris was a good step and I would really like to take my hat off to Dr. Robinson,? said Ms Barry. ?As government folklife officer she has done a tremendous amount in a short period of time. There is talk of doing a similar thing with fiction writing and short stories.?