SUE WALLACE-SHADDAD

Sue Wallace Shaddad

​WHY I WRITE

I have a poem I wrote aged twelve and several as a student when I was finding out about relationships. During my career, I only wrote poems occasionally but the desire to write stayed with me. In 2014, to mark my retirement and to put a stake in the ground, I produced a pamphlet ‘A Working Life’. Since then, I have devoted much of my time to poetry, achieving an MA from Newcastle University/ Poetry School London in 2020.
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I have always enjoyed compressing feelings into words. I tend to write very quickly in pencil in a notepad. This could be in response to something I have seen, an art work or an aspect of a relationship. I write straight into lines. I find this much more natural than starting with freewriting When typing up the text I make improvements to the first draft and might well decide on the likely form. I typically write in tercets, quatrains or couplets but do also try out other forms. Usually, a poem will rest for a few weeks and I will get feedback from one of the poetry groups I attend. Reading at open mics helps test out the poems too.  I know I need to discipline myself more – make more exciting language choices and deepen my thought processes. It is often easy just to be satisfied with the initial thinking, without pushing myself further.
Dempsey and Windle published my short collection of poems about Sudan, ‘A City Waking Up’ in 2020. The poems are a distillation of years of memories of visits to Sudan to see my family; most of them were written there in 2016 and I checked detail of language and customs with relatives. I spent several years getting the poems peer reviewed one by one so it was a real labour of love.
 
I have a particular interest in ekphrastic poetry as I come from a Scottish artistic family and this feels a way of carrying on the tradition, but in the form of words. I have enjoyed collaborating with a local artist and also with a photographer. Recently, I have started creating a collection about portraits of women and portraits by women artists. I have discovered that a collection is much more complex to create than a pamphlet, but it is an exciting project which is pushing me to write more and hopefully better poems.
 
Sue Wallace-Shaddad
Read more about Sue's work here: https://womensliteracysudan.blog/2022/03/13/a-city-waking-up/