Susan Bourrie grew up listening to music from Broadway and movie musicals. As a child, she saw Gypsy with her mother when it came to theatres. She then pretended that her plastic swimming pool was a stage and a blanket hung on a clothes line was the curtain. As she sang, “Let Me Entertain You,” 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.
Susan stopped writing for several years and became a stay-at-home wife and mother. As 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.
Many 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 was a love song written with composer, Dorothy Chang. After it was performed, it received a standing ovation as a serious composition student yelled, “Sell it to Disney!” Susan returned to her graduate studies and put the following song lyric that was inspired by the feelings expressed by a man who was attending a divorced and separated support group into a drawer:
Love, Precious Love
Words by Susan Bourrie
Music by Dorothy chang
Call me old fashioned.
Call me naive.
Tell me I’m over the hill.
The world that we’re in
Is a cesspool of sin
Where love will not win.
Where love will not win.
Say all that you like.
I don’t care.
I won’t listen.
I’ve heard all the moaning before.
I believe in love—still.
I always will.
And the someone I’ll always adore.
I believe there’s a world
Where love never ends.
Where a man and a woman
Can be best of friends.
I believe in a love that is faithful and true
A love that survives on a miracle or two.
A love that gets stronger
With each letting go.
A love, precious love,
I still long to know.
I believe there’s a world where love never lies,
Where love never fades, never leaves, never dies.
I believe in a love that is open and new,
A love that delights in all that you do.
A love that gets stronger with each letting go,
A love, precious love, I still long to know.
A love that takes me as I am.
A love that knows the score.
A love that tells me that I can be better
Then I was before.
I believe in a world that I’ve never seen.
I know it is somewhere I’ve never been.
Where the love in your heart doesn’t tear you apart.
Where the wounds in your soul can be healed, can be whole.
I believe in a love that defies letting go.
A love, precious love, I still long to know.
Susan sometimes writes both words and music for her songs. Her lyrics are included in her Junior Elf books that were published in 2016.
2022 Poetry Society of Michigan Competition
First Place for Humorous Pome
1989 Music City Song Festival Song Lyric
Semifinalist
1987 Writer’s Digest Magazine Poetry Competition
Honorable Mention
1984 Writer’s Digest Magazine Poetry Competition
Honorable Mention
Poetry Society of Michigan Poetry Competition Honorable Mention
Music City Song Festival Lyric Competition
Two Honorable Mentions
1980 International Poetry Competition sponsored by
Poet’s Study Club of Terre Haute
Honorable Mention
Published Poetry
Bourrie, Susan. “Celestial Light.” Groundcover. Ann Arbor, MI: December, 2014, 10.
Bourrie, Susan. “little woman.” Women’s Art Festival Chapbook 1985. Mount Pleasant, MI: Central Michigan University, 1985, 11.
Bourrie, Susan. “Miracle Moments.” The Fulcrum. Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Independent Living, Nov. 1991.
Bourrie, Susan. “Recital or Play it Again and Again and Again, Sam,” Peninsula Poets/Contest Edition. Vol. 79-2, Fall 2022,17.
Bourrie, Susan, “Three Days of a Rose,” Consumer Vision Magazine, November/December, 2014.
Bourrie, Susan. “Time Sharing.” Women’s Art Festival Chapbook 1985. Mount Pleasant, MI: Central Michigan University, 1985, 11.
Starovasnik, Susan. “Love.” Quote Magazine. 1966.
Starovasnik, Susan. “The Soul of Wit.” Quote Magazine. 1966.
Starovasnik, Susan. “Untitled (You Square).” America Sings: 1966 Spring Anthology of College Poetry. Dennis Hartman, ed. Los Angeles: National Poetry Press, 1966, 35.
Starovasnik, Susan. “Untitled (You Square)”. Pegasus: 1964-1968. Dennis Hartman, ed. Los Angeles: National Poetry Press, 1968, 114.
Children’s Narrative Poems Illustrated and Published in Magazines
Bourrie, Susan. “Admiral Seasalt’s Waterbed.” Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine, Dec.
1988.
Bourrie, Susan. “Mortimer J. Readabook, the Medicine Man.” Humpty Dumpty’s
Magazine, Nov. 1986.
Bourrie, Susan. “When Mommy Puts Her Jeans On.” Humpty Dumpty’s Magazine,
May 1986.