Susan Bourrie grew up listening to music from Broadway and movie musicals. She dreamed of writing and starring in her own musical someday. Her dreams were deflated in college when she was told to stop rhyming and to stop writing poetry because she wasn’t a poet. Many years later, when Susan was a stay-at-home wife and mother, she read books to her children and listened to their music. She was inspired again and wrote for the fun of it and even submitted to magazines and contests that she found in The Writer Magazine, just as she had done in high school. Her light verse, poetry, and song lyrics received three Music City Song Festival songwriting awards and six national and international poetry competition prizes and were published in a variety of adult, literary, and children’s magazines.
Decades later, Pulitzer Prize Winning poet, Richard Tillinghast, and Pulitzer Prize Winning composer, William Bolcom, allowed Susan to enroll in their Words and Music graduate class at The University of Michigan while she was studying to be a librarian. Music students and poets collaborated and created songs in many forms. Her final project received a standing ovation as a serious composition student yelled, “Sell it to Disney!”
In 2022, the Poetry society of Michigan awarded First Place for a humorous poem to Susan’s light verse, “Recital, or Play It Again and Again and Again, Sam.”
Children’s Narrative Poems Illustrated and Published in Magazines:
“Admiral Seasalt’s Waterbed.” Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine, Dec.
1988.
“Mortimer J. Readabook, the Medicine Man.” Humpty Dumpty’s
Magazine, Nov. 1986.
“When Mommy Puts Her Jeans On.” Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine,
May 1986.