Every culture has a bogeyman Andrea Olivia Ottley’s preys at night. Through writing, she keeps it at bay.

“I wouldn’t say I’ve always been a writer, but I wrote to keep myself level,” she said.

“[As a child], we really didn’t have the freedom to speak to our parents about anything so any issue that arose that I wanted to figure out, I would sit down and write about it.”

Ms Ottley moved to the island from St Kitts and Nevis 15 years ago.

A regular at writing workshops put on by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs, she said the programmes are good for drawing Bermuda’s talent out of the woodwork.

“I found out Bermuda has this lovely writing community. From there I started growing because we were able to read and critique each other’s work and help each other.”

Her dialect poetry has been published in online literary journals Tongues of the Ocean and St Somewhere; her short stories in three books by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs — I Wish I Could Tell You, Take this Journey with Me, and the latest The Stories We Tell: Bermuda Anthology of Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror.

“Everybody has their own bogeyman,” she said. “That story is based on a true story that I turned into fiction called The Rustle of My Childhood Nightmare.”

As a child, she would have to pass by sugar cane fields to get home.

“The leaves make noise but there’s also a seed pod on it so when the leaves rustle, sometimes that pops — you get a fright and you’re running,” she laughed. “When you’re petrified of the rustle, you don’t know what’s coming.”

The Rustle Man, in local folklore, would come at night if a child wet their bed.

“I was an avid bed-wetter,” she confessed. “Especially when it rained at night or I ate sugar cane.”

She was reluctant to share the experience, but her writing group encouraged her.

“When I wrote it, I found myself growing with the main character. Children suffer these things and are ashamed.”

Writing the story helped her grow from the childhood fear. She hopes it will do the same for young people reading the tale.

Her hope is her writing captures the culture of Grove Village, the small community she comes from in St Paul’s parish.

“The culture of the village was dying and I started writing to harness that culture,” she said.

“I started writing to capture happy times — in disaster, in poverty. Somehow it has always helped me. Even though there is all this destruction, you can still see the beauty. ”

She decided to write down her grandmother’s memories to pass them on to her children.

“By the time they come of age, these things won’t exist, but they’ll have something of what life was like for us,” she said.

Her current project is a book of hurricane letters.

Her partner Niall Aitken died almost two years ago. If he was away during a storm, she would write him a letter to read when he got back.

“I continued to write hurricane letters after his death because that was like a hurricane for me,” she said. “Grief is a hurricane. You just never know what the remnants are going to be.

“The recent one is for my brother for his family in Dominica because a hurricane hit and I haven’t heard from them. That’s like another hurricane going through me.”

She also writes to herself.

“If I’m having a hard day, I’ll write a letter to myself. I’ll put a stamp on it and post it and wait for it to come,” said Ms Ottley who works at wholesale distributor BGA.

“I open it, read it and stick it across my cubicle to inspire me. I e-mail letters to my job every Sunday for Monday.”

When her friends ask her how she finds time to write, the mother-of-four says: “I make time. I don’t find it.

“I get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, go for a run, come back and I give myself an hour to write,” she said. “Anything, whatever comes to mind. After which I prepare the children and get ready for work.

She started the routine after she had her first daughter, who is 21 now.

“I create worlds. I have my family world, my world, my photography world and then I have my writing world. When the children were younger, I would get them a sketch pad and pens and tell them to write or draw; this is my time, so you have your time.

“I cut myself off from everyone just to write.”

It began as a child.

“My adopted dad used to read my things and in one of the stories I was killing everybody off and bringing my biological dad back to life.

“He said, ‘You have a good heart, but that’s a terrible mind’,” the 39-year-old laughed.

“My life is filled with stories and memories, I just have to capture them. It really helps me to understand myself and the world when I write.”

This Isle

this is the isle

the legendary tempest

the lovely outpost of another world

this spot, alone in the North Atlantic Ocean

this solitary isle that lies on the edge of the Sargasso Sea

this our only isle,

with its pastel tints of appendage and apportion

of forty thieves

of old money

of old cottages, and churches

where tribe roads link major roads

where horse-drawn carriages and motor vehicles

nod in acknowledgement

this isle often referred to as the devil’s isle

with festering plights, where natives and immigrants

mingle with an experimental existence

to produce an unreliable amalgam

this isle of cahows and tropic birds

of skinks

of cedar trees and mangrove marshes

of hatred and love

of pink beaches

this skeleton key,

this key clip,

this fish hook,

this dragnet

this mosaic isle, this triangle, this little isle, our isle

this isle, this, this ink blot,

of forest green upon azure blue

this is the isle.