After Barber earned an M.F.A. from the Columbia University creative writing program in 1984, she says she saw "a lot of newer writers whose work really was exciting" coming out of graduate writing schools only to find there weren't many opportunities for them to publish. One of her goals in starting her Brookline, Mass.-based literary journal was to "counteract the feelings of powerlessness. It's having a voice."     Writers from Wales, the Ivory Coast and Pakistan and a new translation of Mikhail Bulgakov's classic Russian novel The Master and Margarita have added an international tone and dimension. Barber says she likes translations "because writers in different cultures may make different claims or take different liberties from the ones we're used to making or taking--which expands the range of possibilities available to us as readers and writers."     The development of desktop publishing made Salamander possible, says Barber, who learned "production language" as coordinator of the production schedule at John Wiley & Sons in New York and continues to freelance for publishers in Boston. On a computer in the attic of her Brookline home, she does the typesetting and gets Salamander camera ready for the printer. The thousand copies of an issue go to subscribers, bookstores and libraries.     Even though Salamander has been reviewed favorably in Small Press Review and received an NEA grant that also set it apart from other journals, raising funds is a constant battle, Barber says. Interns from colleges, mostly aspiring writers who want work experience, help out with fund-raising events and with manuscript screening, proofreading, stuffing and stamping. "It's a total mom and pop shop here," said Barber, whose sister-in-law, Nancy Spargo, has been with the magazine from the beginning. Barber's husband, Peter Brown, is Salamander's fiction editor.     Barber was the first woman in Maine to win a Rhodes Scholarship. A Senior Scholar in poetry at Colby, she says she enjoyed her two years at Oxford studying medieval literature but came away convinced that she "wasn't cut out to be a medieval scholar and work on decaying manuscripts." Twenty years after her days as a gymnast at Colby, Barber jokes that "they won't let you on the balance beam after twenty-five"; but recently, she says, after her son, Jeffrey, 9, started tae kwon do lessons, she took it up, too. She still attends modern dance classes.     And--"a little here and there"--she has published her own poetry. She'll appear soon in Take Three: 3, the third book in a series that introduces three poets in one volume. "It's like a first book," Barber said. "It's been nice to do at the same time as Salamander."