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

Tag: books

  • On Reading “Student of Desire” — Adelle Waldman

    Saturday, August 22, 2026

    “Can intellectual recognition itself become desire?”

    Will an intellectual man fall in love with a woman of equal or greater intelligence? The question has become so entangled with sexism that it seems to invite textbook answers such as, “Beauty is only skin-deep.” But this is not about feminism or social activism. It is an intimate question: “Can you love me even if I am smart but not so pretty?” Waldman’s disappointmentpromptss her to ask about her existential value as a woman, not merely as a writer or intellectual, because the personal stakes are toohighg to ignore.

    Seeing her ex-boyfriend with a beautiful woman is painful enough to prick the pride of an intellectual woman who is supposed to believe that real love resides not in looks but in the mind. Or so it seems. Waldman extends the existential question into the erotic hedonism of The Professor of Desire, whose protagonist seems to vacillate between a whore and a virgin but never reconciles himself to the truth, always yielding to the pleasures of the senses. While I understand Waldman’s disappointment at seeing a smart man fall for a bimbo, she seems to explain his gorgeous new girlfriend as the result of animal instinct: Eros alone, without marrying Eros to Psyche.

    Call it the male subconscious urge to prove sexual prowess. Or immaturity. To me, a man’s intelligence or cultural refinement does not necessarily equate to his moral fitness. Think of the ancient Greek symposium and its beautiful and intelligent courtesans. Men, I think, are often more readily stimulated by the visual than women are. I remember reading that Updike had a voracious sexual appetite and engaged in sexual excesses. And that’s not the end. Arthur Miller’s marriage to Marilyn Monroe—even though she was herself intelligent, read books, and took literature classes at night—and his novella Plain Girl: A Life tell us that intellect does not necessarily determine physical attraction. After all, the plain girl finds her soulmate in a blind musician who loves her not with his eyes but with his mind.

    I know how Waldman felt when she saw him with such a beautiful woman. I think Waldman wants to believe that she is right: that a woman’s intellect can stand equal to beauty—par pari. I think Shakespeare is great because he recognized this human nature in everyone, including the rivalries of love:

    “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
    And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.”

    But remember: Cupid is blindfolded. He does not know whom his arrow will strike.

  • 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

  • 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.

  • 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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    Paul Gauguin: With Sixpences Beneath a Visiting Moon
    
			
    

    




    The Writings of a Savage by Paul Gauguin

    With sixpences beneath a visiting moon, Gauguin could produce wonder. He was an artist in an endless pursuit of the rising sun at the dawn of a day with a flaming glory in dazzling magnificence. He was an intellectual with a wealth of knowledge drawn from a wide range of reading and classical Jesuit education. Gauguin was a man of irony, with contrasting colors reflected in the soul’s spectrum, from the passionate red to the sanguine blue, hopeful green, and melancholic purple, which is why he left Vincent Van Gogh alone in Arles, in never-ending loneliness. He craved recognition in a grand salon, yet he longed for independence on an island beneath an ancient sun. So, naturally, I wanted to know about Gauguin from his own writings, not from another in the form of a biography. Hence, The Writings of a Savage by Paul Gauguin.
    




    The book is an attractive compendium of mostly letters to his select few friends and, occasionally, to his wife, as well as essays and articles on the arts and religion, demonstrating Gauguin’s erudition and introspection. While reading the book, I could not help but think that if he had been a professional journalist or an art critic, his artistic talent would have basked in the glorious dawn sun rather than a struggling painter always on the verge of starvation. But most of all, what I wanted to know was if Gauguin had cut off Gogh’s ear, as I heard the rumor. Before reading this book, I had already assumed Gauguin was a man of temper because his image was incompatible with the Dutch painter’s delicate, sophisticated, and sensitive appearance and temperament. But while my prejudice was not entirely faulty, Gauguin proved himself innocent as he talked about it before his impending death away from civilization. Besides, my reading of Gauguin’s writings convinced me that he was not culpable for the injury, even if some like to assemble circumstantial rumors to make the French pariah artist appear jealous and violent toward the suffering Dutch genius. Gauguin might have been passionate, but his passion is directed toward his artistic creation of the worlds he sees in his mind, while the snobbishness of critics and bureaucrats curates the works of painters who know nothing about the arts.
    




    Imagination, innovation, and independence are the jewels of Gauguin’s prime colors that create his artistic Elysium. Gauguin was liberal in social stance, especially against clericalism, but sovereign in his artistic philosophy that how to draw doesn’t mean an exact copy of the figure because that’s not the purpose of art for art’s sake. As the title suggests, Gauguin was a noble savage who, as a disciple of Rousseau, returned to a primordial state of humanity to escape the over-intellectualized inertia of civilization, which depreciated and ignored his art. I still can’t say the book converted me to the cult of his paintings, which differ from those of Renoir, Monet, and Pissarro. But the book is a medium of looking through the labyrinth Gauguin has built, leading to his secret garden, wondrously vibrant and dazzlingly radiant.
    




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