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

Tag: fiction

  • 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?

  • A Real Witch Pretending to Be a Sister

    Reading Nick Holland’s “The Brontë Love of Pets”

    October 4, 2026

    Branwell drew this cat when he was just 11!, courtesy of Annebronte,org

    Pets are like your children or friends, depending upon how you see them in your own surroundings. I am a sister to my two cats: Toro the Tabby and Camille the Black. Not a Cat Lady or Cat Mom—both burlesque images of a woman living alone with her cats. And I don’t see myself as either—or, for greater atmospheric enchantment, perhaps I am a witch who writes beneath a lustral moon at night. Enough of the self-defense. And Toro and Camille are my lucky stars in my otherwise not-so-lucky life. You got that?

    Camille the Black knows when I cast a spell

    So, reading Holland’s article about the Brontë sisters’ love of their pets at home was a simple pleasure of one Saturday afternoon. Before reading it, I already knew that Emily Brontë had a pet merlin named Nero, whom she fed in the kitchen when Charlotte wasn’t around, since Charlotte wasn’t fond of seeing him there. But I didn’t know they had cats at Haworth Parsonage until I saw their only brother Branwell’s adorable drawing of a cat loafing like bread, much like my Toro. In fact, the Brontës were very fine artists, as seen in their pictures of Nero, Flossy (Anne’s spaniel), and Grasper (Emily’s mastiff).

    The dogs seem more like the sisters’ familiars than the cats do, given the sensibilities and personalities concealed beneath the narrative veneer of their novels. Still, Haworth Parsonage was filled with the pets’ amiability and the family’s moments of contentment. No wonder the sisters frowned upon and judged anyone who displayed indifference or irritation toward pets or other animals beyond the parsonage.

    My Practorian Guard Toro at Ease

    Back in my tiny apartment in LA, I am writing this note with Toro under my legs. He looks at me with large emerald eyes full of liquid tenderness and affection. He knows I am writing, and if he likes what I am writing through our special astral connection, he stays still as a gesture of approval. I know Edgar Allan Poe’s cat Catterina used to do something similar, but Toro is more like my Roman Praetorian Guard, standing watch over my writing. As for Camille, he is sleeping in his secret hideaway in my bedroom, but soon he will come out and look at me with his amber eyes, saying “Meow,” which means, “I am hungry.”

    I don’t care if I am a real witch pretending to be a sister.

  • 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.

  • Saturday Reading Notes on Bitter Water Opera

    September 12, 2026

    My reading today of Sophie Golub’s review of Nicolette Polek’s Bitter Water Opera is a literary matryoshka: a reflection on a review of a book I have not yet read. Yet Golub’s elegant summary of the story reveals the book’s undertone: a woman’s admiration for a particular artist. It is a story embedded within a story, conveyed through a reviewer’s reading of a writer’s book.

    The story revolves around a woman named Gia. She is the narrator, who sends unaddressed letters to Marta Becket, an artist whose art and inner life draw Gia into her solar system, which Gia tries to adopt as her own, because Marta is Gia’s kind of artist and person. She is at a point in her life where she needs direction. She needs a clear purpose in life, so she turns to Marta, who has already become a ghost hovering at Gia’s front door. Gia tries to find a reason to live in others’ lives rather than contemplating her own. She needs to see her own reflection in someone or something outside herself. Marta becomes that reflection, though Gia doesn’t realize she may have been chasing her own shadow.

    But I also get Gia’s point about why she favors artists who are dead and out of reach. I read this distance as Gia’s protective shield against the corruption of artists in the real world. In her mind, the familiar image of successful writers is shaped by publicity funded by their publishers and amplified by the media, all too obviously for profit. Likewise, I tend to be drawn to writers who have become ghosts because they are frozen in time; their human faults and imperfections cannot easily interfere with my admiration for their work. Both Gia and I internalize our own artistic principles and judge other artists against those internalized principles.

    I may not have read the review in the way it was intended. But basically, the review centers on Gia’s “existential ennui,” a state in which Gia loses her sense of meaning and desperately needs a model with whom she can identify. I can see something of myself in Gia because we are both interested in people with unique stories. Yet Golub does not allow Marta to remain a flawless model: Marta and her theater also need saving, and Gia’s final transformation is stated more clearly than it is felt.

  • Sunday Letter – 1

    Sunday, August 23, 2026

    Hi Freddo,

    I thought the heat had gone and had prepared for autumn clothes, but it was a vain hope. It was a trick of nature. The heat persists, and it is very hot. So, I have been staying in the living room with my cats because it is the coolest room and has an air conditioner. I hear that the heat wave has hit Italy, too. I hope you are okay.

    I just finished reading Elizabeth Taylor’s A View of the Harbour. It is about an English coastal village called Newby, where people’s lives are interwoven through weakness, treachery, and misunderstanding, for which they pay with loss and departures. It is written in the third person—an omniscient point of view that sees all and knows all. The perspective often shifts to that of the elderly, bedridden Mrs. Bracey, who watches people as if she were watching a television soap opera. But she can’t see the stories behind the people she watches, and, in fact, she doesn’t care. I wonder if God would be like her. He sees us from above but doesn’t want to interfere with our affairs, even when we want him to, because God couldn’t care less about them unless they relate to his worship.

    It seems that the sea always provokes the passion smoldering beneath conventions and norms, stirring the urge to let the flame ride the crest of the waves, clash furiously against wave upon wave, and then become one with the deep blue. In this regard, the sea alters none of it: human instinct, desire, the primitive id. The harbour is the superego because we know what we should and shouldn’t do under the community’s safe-harbor rule. Seen from the sea, the harbour is prudence.

    These are the things that came to mind after reading the book. I suspect that this multiplicity of interpretations is what Taylor wanted. In the post–Second World War era, people had lost their collective values and systems of belief, leaving them in an existential dilemma. But the sea doesn’t know it. The harbour keeps all of it inside, like a graceful swan with her legs paddling frantically beneath the water to preserve her poise.

    What do you think? Do you want to read the whole book? If you do, you will feel as though you are watching a British television drama, with various characters who seem ordinary yet harbor extraordinary secrets, and stories that unfold without ostentatious romance, extravagant affairs, or dashing bravado. For me, it’s viewable because it is relatable.

    Are you coming to California after the heat has subsided on both sides of the ocean? Let me know, and we can plan something together, like Prudence and Geoffrey in the book.

    Regards,

    stefania