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

Tag: hearts

  • 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 journal of cat writer #1

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    The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius said, ” Don’t feel harmed, and you won’t be, and you haven’t been.” Centuries later the emperor’s medieval Christian heathen Thomas Aquinas corroborated that no words should do harm on the soul of the heard. Well, it’s easier to say than to be done, especially from the high chairs of big wigs. So much so that none of those self- hypnosis of affirmation prescribed by the privileged rings true to me as I am trying to put together pieces of my heart.

    The cause of the malady of the heart ensues from my twitter correspondence with a literary man over my prescient knowledge of Theodora, a former comedian turned the wife of emperor Justian of East Roman Empire in the 6th century A.D. She was later canonized in the Eastern Orthodox Church, and her feast day is November 14, which he had denied. As it is my nature to strike up a meaningful conversation based on knowledge with an intelligent person with seeming affability, I commented on his tweet politely in bona fide intention to inform him of ill-conceived intelligence. However, the response felt heartbreaking with a blunt inflection that froze my heart instantly.

    By the spirit of utilitarian knowledge, I guided him to Wikipedia source that corroborated the fact. Despite his gratitude for the rectification, the disheartening incident has only cemented my long-term speculation that it’s either I was born luckless to have a seamless casual conversation with a stranger or I am hexed to be kept from anything nice even to the simplest and smallest degree happening to me – ever. Methinks, everything I think and touch turns useless gold with a feckless Midas touch.

    As Shakespeare aptly described, my nature is modulated by what it works in, like the dyer’s hand. I have also found that these flaunty intellectual men and women in the habiliment of affable erudition often turn out to be a superficiality of knowledge and disappointment of heart, floundering me ever in the lurch of disillusion. Moreover, although they seem so dazzlingly smart, they are not always omniscient. Maybe, I think, unless you are educated under the tutelage of kindly Chiron, the wise elderly centaur to whom Achilles, the son of Thetis, and Asclepius were entrusted, the immaculate acquisitions of knowledge and cultural finesse require divine intervention.