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

Category: BIBLIO ECRIT

  • Saturday, October 24, 2026 — Reading of Chloë Ashby’s Review of Alone with a Book by Tessa Hadley, Published in The Guardian on October 20,2026 (Saturday Reading Essay)

    One reason I don’t like books by contemporary writers is that many of them seem to come from privileged backgrounds, with prestigious academic credentials and a socioeconomic status that protects them from the burden of working for a living. Poets are not much different: they find meaning in the everyday tasks that the rest of us must perform simply to live. Ashby’s review of Alone with a Book by Tessa Hadley sets a bell ringing in my spirit, instantly piquing my interest in the life of a kindred spirit in stories. What makes Hadley unique among her contemporaries is her delight in the ordinary, the seemingly mundane and trivial.

    My literary heroines are Agnes Grey, Jane Eyre, Prudence in A View of the Harbour, Macabéa in The Hour of the Star, and Renée in The Elegance of the Hedgehog. What do these women have in common? They have no glamorous jobs with PPO health insurance or weeks of paid vacation, nor the kind of intricate intellectual vertigo that places them on a higher pedestal. And if a character is the opposite of these women, she usually rebels against social norms or thrusts her fist toward the sky while chanting for social equality without knowing what it is. Have I forgotten books about ideology and identity, which are so in vogue? Or the confessional memoirs published by celebrities, and so forth? What a medley of public existential angst, clamoring to become bestsellers or national bestsellers.

    Hadley is a woman of letters who draws wisdom and beauty from life through her intellectual curiosity about the three value paths in logotherapy: creative, experiential, and attitudinal, which can be achieved by fulfilling the duties daily life gives us. I am uncertain whether Hadley wrote her essay and her other books with the tenets of logotherapy in mind, but these values seem to match her worldview and her literary world. In Charlotte Brontë’s terms, an author should write what is true to herself and therefore true to life, just as her little sister Anne Brontë did in Agnes Grey. Anne drew on her own experience as a governess, enduring—with the grace of a swan and the attentiveness of a cat—the haughtiness of those who employed her to educate their children. Agnes saw the precarious human emotions in her employers’ flaunting of influence and beauty. I am certain that Hadley would love to write about an Agnes Grey of our time.

    What distinguishes Hadley from others is her view of Christianity as a positive influence that has shaped cultural imagination and our idea of beauty, a way to see beauty in human life. This is remarkable because it is uncommon to find Christianity as a foundation for artistic inspiration in the aesthetic expression of human emotions. She remains in awe of religious paintings, including The Coronation of the Virgin by Jacopo di Cione and The Assassination of Saint Peter Martyr by Giovanni Bellini. Hadley finds Christianity’s magnanimity in life and art rather than in the Church’s catechism.

    I regard myself as a ghost lover, as many of my beloved writers have become stars in literature’s constellation. To me, their work feels more inviting, letting me know more about the characters through whom the writers delineate silhouettes of themselves. But I cannot help but think that writing about someone with no six-figure income, a big house without a mortgage, and/or glittering academic credentials and beauty has become an oddly rare literary subject, at least for now.

  • Saturday, October 17th, 2026 – Reading of Yiyun Li’s “‘Infinite Genius’: On Anne Carson,” published in The Guardian

    When I read Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony & God, I felt as though I were reading riddles in prose poetry, imagining the Pythia speaking Apollo’s words from her tripod at Delphi. It is strange in its arrangement of simple language, beautiful in its narrative of her inner world—a maze where she lets readers or listeners find her. Guy Davenport’s introduction summed up this collection: she wrote philosophy as poetry in language accessible to the layperson, with a poet’s eye, speaking to general readers, not a select few.

    Reading Li’s article on Carson becoming a Nobel laureate in literature this year confirmed my appreciation of the rare beauty of Carson’s poetry. I knew Carson was different from poets of our time because her poems were personal yet relatable, with themes ranging from her elderly mother to her former lover and her experiences in Italy. Li’s admiration for Carson’s literary world comes from Carson’s alchemy of words, which Carson conjures as her fingers move across a blank page. She has no grimoire for poetry, but she possesses the poetic mania that Plato regarded as sacred. Words will come when you write. Let the spirit move your hand.

    Although Li’s essay grows from her grief over the loss of her two sons and her reading of Carson’s Grief Lessons, which I have not yet read, her praise seems to idolize Carson’s work, contrary to Carson’s intentional use of plain language to reach the hearts of general readers. Moreover, Li’s effusive lionization of Carson’s work makes it seem to belong only to Li. Carson writes of love, of life, and of herself through the mind of a poet singing in plain English. She is something of a Socrates, who brought philosophy from heaven to the world by knocking on people’s doors to speak of the love of wisdom.

    I believe what is good for the mind—and ultimately the body, as the Romans said, mens sana in corpore sano, “a sound mind in a sound body”—should be shared. Carson’s status as a Nobel laureate should not distance her work from general readers by placing it among the untouchable literati. Carson invites readers into her maze and gives them language as a ball of thread, leading them toward the riveting light of her enchanting mind. I believe this is what Carson wants.

  • Writers of Extraordinary Hearts

    Saturday Reading of Kerry Clare’s “Beyond ‘Women’s Fiction…’ On the Quiet Brilliance of Barbara Pym,”

    published by Literary Hub on March 16, 2026

    October 10, 2026

    Muriel Barbery, Clarice Lispector, and Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress) could give voices to women whose quiet presences belied the flame within. They could see the stories in what others dismissed as insignificant and draw readers’ attention to their lives. Renée from Barbery’s The Elegance of the Hedgehog was a sophisticated, erudite woman with an unacknowledged sultriness. Macabéa from Lispector’s The Hour of the Star might have been a shy typist but was an undercover beauty with her red lipstick. Prudence from Taylor’s A View of the Harbour was a lonely, beautiful girl who was never popular. Now Barbara Pym joins these writers of extraordinary hearts.

    I haven’t yet landed on Barbara Pym’s universe, and I’m happy to read Clare’s essay on her work and characters who sound a lot like the aforesaid characters. Her characters revolve around the daily tasks of ordinary life. Other writers often avoid such lives because the material is either (1) too unglamorous to attract readers from a milieu similar to that of the authors and their characters, or (2) too mundane to accommodate the fashionable existential dilemmas so prevalently narrated within elite literary circles. Some of today’s women writers also fall into this pattern, creating expensively educated women—or scholarship winners risen from rags—who are beautiful, independent, and supplied with lovers for passionate nights and days anywhere. Okay, I get it. I may be too biased, or too inaccurately accusatory, toward writers who don’t write like writers with extraordinary hearts. But if you know my point, I am sure you get it—don’t you?

    Writing about something you do every day can bore you and your readers. But if you find a story in how you do it, why you do it, and what you do—or will do—about it, that is the gem of the story; it makes the simple powerful. I remember reading a book about a legal secretary at a large New York City law firm, written by an author who drew on her own working life. Her narrative shows readers what routine work can conceal, giving them a reason to understand why people are the way they are.

    When I look at some of those who advocate for the rights of the oppressed and underprivileged, I notice that they do not always acknowledge the people around them in daily life. At times, ideology comes before humanity because writing about diaspora, social injustice, and identity crises is now presumed to be intellectual, just, and conscientious. Charlotte Brontë, who wrote about women compelled to work—usually under less-than-gracious employers—said that an author’s first duty was “a faithful allegiance to Truth and Nature.” What could be truer than telling a story of a woman ignored and invisible?

  • The Books Have Come Home

    My author’s copies of The Glass and the Flame have finally arrived. As you can see, Toro, my LA Praetorian Guard, is inspecting the copies to make sure we received them all.

    Now I know how Sappho must have felt when she wrote to leave her legacy as proof of her existence for posterity. Who knows? A thousand years from now—as long as humanity continues—perhaps a future Stephanie will happen upon my book and do the same.

    Ars longa, vita brevis.
    (Art is long, life is short.)

    P.S. The Glass and the Flame is available at:
    https://dulcetshop.myshopify.com/products/suh

  • Thursday, October 1, 2026 – A History of Crete by Chris Moorey (Reading Note)

    Before the Greeks came, there were the Minoans, with their Linear A, saffron gatherers, bull-leaping boys and girls, and dolphins jumping out of the Aegean Sea. The Minotaur in the Labyrinth was a creature of the island, and the islanders were vibrantly colorful in clothing and facial expression, as seen in the frescoes. The Snake Goddess danced before the klepsydra of civilization’s history, as if her sinewy body uncoiled to birth her children, first in her beloved Crete.

    A History of Crete unfolds the mystery of its people like Ariadne guiding Theseus through the Labyrinth with a ball of thread, allowing us to see the face of the mystical Minotaur: half man and half bull. Rather than producing a stuffy, academically inclined history of Crete, the author organizes each chapter and section chronologically, with Herodotus-like backstories about who the Cretans were, what they did, and how they did it. Crete was Zeus’s home—literally, at least in myth. It was where he was born and where he fathered children in its royal line. Perhaps this home-ground advantage affected Cretan society, whether the god intended it or not.

    One of the most remarkable claims I encountered in the book is that, compared with Sparta, slaves in Crete were not treated as harshly as their counterparts in Sparta. Moreover, the Hermaea festival at Cydonia was a Cretan equivalent of a carnival, in which masters served their slaves and endured their ridicule in a role-reversing psychological drama. Such a custom might have helped the slaves release their emotions and thus prevented them from plotting to subvert the status quo.

    Although I enjoyed reading this book, it was somewhat different from what I had expected; I wanted to know more about the people, such as what they wore, what they ate, how they spoke, and what they did at home or at work. My growing interest somehow stalled as the centuries passed because I wanted to remain in ancient Crete. Call me biased, but I would have been more delighted to read anything about the ancient Minoans than about Crete under its successive conquerors. But then, that is the author’s call, not mine.

    This book is a commanding introduction to more detailed studies of Crete’s mysterious peoples and their lives on the island. And I know that this is what the author wanted it to be. He serves as something of a cicerone, helping readers discover what they did not know. It is also a good coffee-table read to pick up when Netflix has nothing interesting to offer, or simply to dispel boredom.

    No matter where you read this book, you will not close it without a piece of ancient treasure from Crete.

  • Between Fatum and the Void: A Reading Note on Sana Goyal’s Review of Tice Cin’s Safe Spaces

    September 19, 2026

    Book III of The Aeneid tells of Aeneas and his Trojans sailing through life’s vicissitudes to reach the destined place, Italy. The voyage is perilous and circuitous; it is almost ridiculous that, even when they reach Sicily, Aeneas must detour yet again because obstacles keep preventing him from reaching Italy smoothly. But he knows that it is his fatum—his destiny, written by Fate and scripted by the Olympians. Thus, his voyage is never aimless, nor does he abandon himself to the force of fatalism or an existential vacuum.

    In the case of the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in Safe Spaces by Tice Cin, the emptiness of an uprooted life in working-class London is existential: through her eyes, it becomes a void in the meaning of life. Told in the first person, her ballad moves through shifting perspectives, as though she were an alien songbird observing from a separate space. She moves through doorways, “walking past each one,” because she seems to feel that no one cares whether she is an artist from Cyprus whose first language is Turkish. She feels her presence as a songwriter and music producer in the streets of London is insignificant, or worse, invisible. One’s creative value, wrapped in attitudinal value, dims beneath an outward identity defined by culture and gender.

    In contrast to her comparison of memory to a messy laundry cupboard, memory, to me, is a messy pile of CDs and cassettes stored on the closet shelves: the first music I came to know, the favorites I could listen to a hundred times over, and the ones I can hardly believe I ever bought. But I don’t want to discard or sell them. And still, I haven’t decided what to do with them while I am listening to “Hunter” by Dido on my iPhone.

    The choice of personal pronouns can elegantly convey the author’s shift in perspective, diluting subjectivity with objectivity, and vice versa. I write to create, she writes to speak, and you write to express. We know that the different pronouns work in different ways.

    I haven’t read the book yet, and honestly, I don’t think it will be on my book list. From the review, the book seems written for peers of the author’s generation, and its narrator works in the music industry. (Yes, art has money too.) As a young immigrant girl, my concern was getting a job while going to school so that I could help support my family. The narrator does face financial precarity, but she doesn’t seem to carry the same familial pietas—the obligation to help support a family—that shaped my youth. I feel more akin to Aeneas navigating the dangers of Scylla and Charybdis than to the nameless young Turkish-Cypriot songwriter and music producer in London.