Born and raised in Liverpool, Sue made her way south through England before settling on the banks of a small river near the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland. After a career spanning education and psychotherapy, she is still searching for just the right words and is happy to have found a group of people engaged in that same search. Her work has been published in journals, anthologies and magazines. It can be found on the YouTube channels of The Bangor Literary Journal, Issue 11 and in the Community Arts Partnership anthologies, Heartland (2021) and Threshold (2022) where her poems, The Goldfinch and a naming of parts, were longlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. In 2023 she won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing for her poem, Four Stories About (The Same) Crows. Her poems unmoored and Paradise Lost have been winning entries for the Soundwaves Competition (2024) and the Bangor Literary Journal Issue 21 (2025) respectively

Logophilia

I love words 

I love the sound of them
the source of them

I love the way a thing becomes a metaphor
a metaphor becomes a thing

I love the melody of euphony 

I love etymology – got muddled once and spoke of entomology

I love the way that happiness derives from chance
that muscle comes from little mouse
that quarantine began as forty days

I love remembering my dad’s words 
the silly pirates sliding down the stairs 
I love it that they spoke in Scouse

I love the Jabberwocky’s made-up words
name slithy toves the people I like least

I love words’ different registers 
the frozen and the formal ones
the casual and demotic ones
love knowing whence they came

I love the way the right word makes me feel  
a joiner in a club of gone-befores

I love it when you know just what I mean
when I can say the word that helps 
you know you’re understood

I like the way words gain new meaning
when they’re sung
the way they echo round a note

I love the way we burble extra sounds 	
turn chat into a two-part song

I love the way words make me smile
a play on them like games of hide and seek

I love the way they carry all our moods
the sound of them  
the source of them

I love the way a word can mean two things
and more

Don’t carp 
I’m finished now

With kind regards 
All love 
Sincerely Yours 
Farewell