Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Author: Stephanie Suh

  • At the Harbour, Before I Know the Story

    Reading Day — Thursday, August 13th, 2026

    On Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour

    My first time in the harbour: at the dock, standing in the sea breeze. English air. An unfamiliar coast, oddly familiar. But this is not a book about the cozy English sea town in a postcard.

    I have read only the first few pages of the book, and it has already given me its weather and atmosphere. I feel the harbour holding the secrets of the townspeople. I feel the sea carrying the flotsam and jetsam of life quietly and bringing them into the harbour—an always moving inside a never-arrival.

    The characters I have met so far are ordinary in the sense that none of them has that fierce individualism, existential malady, or anything that instantly piques the senses. But people may find pornography in Jane Eyre: the tension, the ache, the desire. They are not spoken but felt. People keep them in the mind, as if giving a voice to the forbidden would desecrate Jane Eyre.

    I think that is what the book wants us to see: what may seem ordinary on the surface, like a calm sea, hides a storm spiraling into a pillar of fury, discordance, and disorientation. I have not yet come to know the characters, except for Prudence, whose two Siamese cats love pushing their small heads against her legs. It is the cats that draw my attention to her, but she seems to have a story to tell as a beautiful young girl who does not act like a beautiful teenage girl.

    Prudence is Prudence: Quaker in name, puritanical in action. But she may turn out to be someone different from what I have seen as I progress through the pages, although I want her to remain as I see her now. I want her to be beautiful without being popular.

    That is life, isn’t it? Change is human, an uninvited grace. You want someone you like to remain the way you know them. That is what I want to know after I complete reading the book.

    The sea will remain the same. The harbour may not.

    — Stephanie Joori Suh

  • Queen’s cats

    Share a photo of your pet and tell us one thing that makes them uniquely them.

    Camile (L) and Toro (R) on their look out from Queen’s Castle

    My cats think they are human. They like Häagen-Dazs ice cream and want to lounge in the living room with me, let alone jump on my bed when I say good night each night. Did I also mention that they’re bilingual?

    Toro in Toga channeling into an ancient Roman aristocrat

    Toro, the 6-year-old tabby, is a little tiger who wants to help me when I work from home, always insisting on typing emails and notes on my work laptop, which need my spellcheck. He takes breaks and lunch with me, so I am never alone at home. And Toro’s being human doesn’t stop there. He knows when my brother calls because he always sits next to me, his little furry body resting on my side.

    Camille’s magic eyes

    Camille, the 4-year-old black cat, is a little black panther who looks just like Gigi from Kiki’s Delivery Service. Although Camille speaks no Korean, he understands when I tell him my secret wishes and how grateful I am that he lives with me because I am lucky to live with such an adorable black cat.

    Toro as my assistant

    Whoever says cats are naturally independent and feral has not seen Toro and Camille. They are very affectionate and loving. I see their spirits in amber and emerald eyes. I feel their little hearts on my chest and at my feet.

    And they slowly blink their big eyes and bunt their little heads when I say, “I love you so much in every universe.”

  • prompt returns

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s a promise you made to yourself that you’ve actually kept?
    View all responses

    I collect promises like Swarovski jewelry, from necklaces to earrings, to bracelets, and more. I love pretty things, so I change them, but it all comes down to a few select ones that I usually wear to my heart’s liking. So are my promises. There are many, but only a few of them remain, and one of them makes it out to a World Cup final.

    I have always wanted to write a book that I can leave as my legacy, just so to prove I have lived, that I, Stephanie Joori Suh, lived, saw, and wrote. The thought that one day my body will become a speck of dust or ashes gives me a panic attack amounting to losing my eyesight completely. The ancient Greek poetess Sappho also felt the same, as found in one of her surviving fragments. Besides, there is something in me urging me to write as it is my nature. My father once told me that he had the same urge to write poetry, as his mother did too. Maybe it’s in the genes, like a family of practicing ancient secret rites.

    What I have done is to write my first chapbook of poetry this year. It is a collection of poems I wrote from my East Coast years to the present West Coast years. I auto-published a short story before as a Kindle Read, but this is my first time submitting a poetry chapbook to editors of ten presses. Some of them are for chapbook prizes, and some are regular chapbook submissions. And… one of them sent me an email last Wednesday that they wanted to publish my chapbook. I do not want to open a champagne early until I have an actual chapbook of mine in hand. Still, I feel I am in the procession of poets from the misty past and continuing as long as humanity remains.

  • Five Poems Published in Morphrog, Issue 33

    I am delighted to share that five of my poems have been published in Morphrog, Issue 33.

    The poems are:

    • The Klepsydra
    • The Double Blue
    • Metamorphosis
    • The Moon Sees Me
    • If I Were a Flower

    My sincere thanks to the editors of Morphrog for publishing these poems.

    You can read them here:

    Stephanie Suh

  • On A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

    On returning to the quiet joy of reading, one discovers that some stories are not only theirs but yours too. Annie Ernaux’s A Woman’s Story was one of those stories—hers and mine.

    It was one of the days I visited my mom at the convalescent hospital for the elderly when I started reading this story, sitting by her bedside. Call it providence if you are religious or coincidence otherwise, but I wasn’t expecting it to become my story as well about my mom, who had been hospitalized since her stroke in January of this year. It was as though Ernaux was speaking to me as a daughter to daughter about her mom and mine, collapsing time and place and the cultural and social differences between us. No wonder I wanted to finish reading it at one sitting.

    This book is not of a certain literary genre. To call it a biography of her childhood and her mom’s influence on her misses the point of why it took her a year to finish the book. It’s much more than that. The absence of her mom made the author realize her mom’s place in her memory. Her mother was the first witness to Ernaux entering the world naked, and later, to her becoming the woman she is. It’s both a biological and an existential view of the author’s raison d’être. That there is no longer anyone on the other side of the first relationship, which has ended forever. It aches. It lingers. It evanesces. And before all of this will vanish into the ether, Ernaux lives to tell about the presence that was so familiar with her being that not seeing, hearing, and feeling it is painful to bear without letting it take the form of writing because writing is personal yet public, pensive but assertive, and quiet but powerful.

    I can understand the kind of ache the author felt after her mother’s death. Whether you loved her or not, you would never see her in life again. She may live in your vision of the past, but her person as a presence does not exist in this world. And that realization of forever disappearance would throw you into the abyss, stifled, blinded, and muffled—by the ineffable sorrow mixed with mystical longing.

    I think about my mom and me. What if she leaves this world soon—tomorrow, the day after, or anytime soon? Oftentimes, I wake up with indescribable terror at the thought that soon I will lose her to eternity if I breathe, like a panic attack. And it dawns on me that it is this feeling of detachment from the relationship, as the bond between mom and daughter is severed forever.

  • Mirror Lake

    




    




    Tonight, the sea is a sheet of glass,
    holding the moon’s timid face.

    “Don’t look at me—
    but don’t look away.”

    I lean toward her under the water,
    my face bruised with sadness,
    trembling beside hers
    in awe of still beauty.

    Two girls gaze back at me—
    sheepish, curious, luminescent:
    one made of ache,
    one made of flame.

    Her eyes—two diamonds
    cut from the tears of indifference.
    Drops fall into the lake,
    ricocheting sorrow into smile.

    I reach to touch their faces,
    but their reflections dissolve—
    a shimmer undone by my hand.

    I try to gather the pieces,
    but the more I gather,
    the deeper they sink
    to the bottom of the water.

    I lost the only friend
    who looked like me.
    Now my face alone—
    a ghost-girl drowning in her own reflection,
    born from love, but never for it.
    




    




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