What some of the writers had to say about being accepted in The Caribbean Writer and their work.

Bermuda High School for Girls teacher and poet Lisa Howie saw a request for Bermudian writers to submit work thought that some of her own would appropriate.

?I would describe my poetry writing as impulsive,? said Miss Howie. ?I might wake up in the middle of the night with a poem, the ideas and images, so clear in my mind that I scramble to find my journal and pen the words in the dark.

?Later, I might have to decode the scribble ? sometimes it doesn?t matter if I return to the piece again or not, because not everything penned is worth mulling over and revising.

?But the writing feels good, and often my mind won?t rest unless I get the words out of it.?

Miss Howie is also affected by her dreams, the images sometimes stay with me for several days, said the author who is working on a young adult novel.

?My uncle Ivan was a writer who chronicled his dreams, but I don?t have the discipline to write each morning ? I?m not that kind of writer,? she said.

?Perhaps I would be more serious and dedicated if I wasn?t so steeped in language; being an English teacher doesn?t provide much respite from the language of others.?

In the case of the Outlook, there is an image in there that was triggered by an actual event, she said: ?Seeing the V-formation of the geese overhead on a clear, windless summer evening, the sun setting on a placid lake.

?It was such a still evening that we almost expected to hear the flap of their wings; instead, the air that they displaced collectively brushed across our upturned faces as they faded into the distance.

?My friend and I couldn?t believe that we could feel their wake. Finding the words to describe such moments is the pleasure of writing.?

The thrill of seeing a piece of her work published is an exciting. ?It is also liberating ? setting the work free to be scrutinised by the reader ? friendly or otherwise.?

Poet Alan Smith has been published in a few journals and anthologies now, but his ultimate goal is a book of his own work. He had three poems accepted.

Nana was written around 1998 and was part of a rather dark choreo-poem, in which he explored pre-millennium angst, that he was developing for performance.

?It was based on a childhood recollection,? he said, ?And Pillow Poem is a love poem/anti-love poem written in 2002. Uncooked was written in June 2004 and was inspired by the desire to write that perfect, moving poem that everyone can relate to, the classic, but settling for that pure, core expression that moves the writer most.?

Chris Astwood wrote two poems, Cavello Bay Quartet and All Day Long a Bonfire Danced, both clearly Bermudian in setting.

?I don?t want to talk about them too much ? spoils the fun ? but on the surface the former is an invocation of a specific place, while the latter?s about time and that subtle thing explained as String Theory, Jah or Chaos depending on who?s doing the explaining, and how you?re trying to escape that thing, finding that it?s not escape you?re after,? he said.

?It ends with more of a release than an epiphany, the rushing of the tide. Still, I figure that I said what I had to say best by writing them and if that isn?t what you get out of them then it?s fine by me ? authorial authority is very pre-postmodernism.?

A piece was extracted from the non-fictional original entitled Interior Monologue, was Angela Barry?s offering.

?It is reflection on a journey that I took with a small group into the interior of Guyana, on the northern fringe of the Amazonian basin,? said Ms Barry.

?It was a life-changing trip with the purity and power of the natural environment forcing all of those of us who travelled to also look at that other interior ? that of the human heart.?

Saskia Wolsak?s poem was entitled Dream and it was written during the winter of 2002 when she was visiting Halifax, Nova Scotia for the first time.

?I was sitting in a caf?, looking at the window and writing from the point of view of all the things I could see outside ? the cars, the trash bins, the trees, and the leaves in the falling snow,? said Ms Wolsak.

?This poem, with it?s grand heart and great intentions, was the voice of the humble black plastic trash bin by the side the road.?

The Caribbean Writer accepted two poems that Ron Lightbourne submitted and they were There?s No Such Thing As Time and A Puerto Vallarta Journal.

?By coincidence they both have a Mexican connection,? he explained.

The first is a meditation on a conversation he had with his son , to whom the poem is dedicated. The inspiration came in Mexico City many years ago when Mr. Lightbourne and his children, Jonathan and Jessica, were there for a holiday.

After climbing and exploring all day, he and his son got onto a cosmic level chat.

His son?s closing sentence was: ?And so we understand the loneliness of God.?

But along the way he?d tried to explain to me the artificiality of our concept of time and he said: ?There?s no such thing as time?.

?It stayed with me and became the inspiration and title of a poem, which I wrote a good while later. It meditates on the effect of time?s passing, and a father?s love.?

The other poem is called ?A Puerto Vallarta Journal? and it was written because of the recollection of an evening walk and the thoughts that came to him during it.

?It too, is a meditation on time,? he said. ?Years after the entry was written I was reading it and it struck me that it could be a poem with just a few changes.

Now my daughter carries a copy of the poem in her wallet.?

Jane Downing has been reading Caribbean Writer online for a few years and she has found that the subjects in it are familiar, and yet foreign; the landscape is more tropical, magnified, lush; issues which Bermudians have glossed over are confronted head on; in the background are the constants of shared lineage, the sea, slavery, and colonial and Atlantic history.

?For me, as for many Bermudians, it is like looking in a mirror and seeing another version of our Island, our lives,? she said.

?I have often wondered whether Bermuda would ever develop a strong body of its own literature: one which was deeply based in our island, our experiences and our history, one which would begin to explore the question of what it is to be Bermudian, to live in Bermuda.

?There was nothing of the sort available when I was growing up and going to school. Everything was about foreign landscapes and situations.?

So, when she learned from Angela Barry that there was to be a special feature in Caribbean Writer on Bermuda, she was very excited.

?I contributed three poems: Nightwatch, Burnt by Fire 1730, and Villanelle of Privilege,? she said. ?Nightwatch is an attempt to capture the spirit of a person I know who makes it his business in this age of breaking and entering, assault and so forth, to keep an eye on his close-knit, largely family, neighbourhood at night while everyone else is asleep.

?His nightly vigil represents to me the intersection of our old intimacy with the Bermuda landscape and with each other; and the realities of crime, financial pressure and crowding in modern Bermuda.

?Burnt by Fire, 1730 was written after reading a paper on Sarah Bassett, which Dr. Clarence Maxwell published in the Bermuda Journal of Maritime History and Archaeology.

?Through his research Dr. Maxwell was able to place Sarah Bassett in the context of West African medical traditions and early eighteenth century networks of slave knowledge and commerce, as well as finding a crucial ? and previously unknown ? piece of information, which suggests that her plot represented the settling of an old score.

?I was fascinated with Dr. Maxwell?s research, with the names of the poisons Sarah Bassett was alleged to have used, and with the effect that her discovery must have had on Bermuda slave owners.

?The third poem ?Villanelle of Privilege? began with my attempt to write a villanelle. The subject emerged as I was writing - probably because it is

suited to the villanelle?s obsessive, repetitive form and because it is something which has been on my mind for a long time.

?What is the legacy of Bermuda?s past? What does it mean for me as a white Bermudian? How can I reconcile my knowledge about the past with my sense of belonging and identity??