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

Tag: Nonfiction

  • “On Falling In and Out of Love With Dead Artists as an Art Historian” by Allison Leigh, published in Literary Hub on November 5, 2026 (Saturday Reading)

    FARMHOUSE IN PROVENCE
    Vincent van Gogh

    I have a confession to make. I am a ghost lover. A lover who finds love in language made flesh. Aeneas, Virgil, Sappho, Anne Brontë, and Clarice Lispector remain as I have read and thought of them, without the disappointment of their human foibles in life. My ghost love is not necessarily erotic; it is closer to the Elizabethan sense of the word “friend,” which could mean “lover.” Perhaps I don’t belong to the current period of time, or I am simply made that way. And I love it.

    “On Falling In and Out of Love With Dead Artists as an Art Historian” is an Augustinian confession by Allison Leigh, an art historian who fell in love with the artists despite their infamous misogynistic tendencies and appalling behavior towards women. Leigh described her growing attachment in the way a method actor becomes the character she plays. But to me, she seemed more like an investigative journalist covering an artistic scandal who then found herself infatuated with the artist. Or shall I call it erotic Stockholm syndrome?

    Honestly, it seems to me that Leigh’s love of the infamous misogynistic artists must have come from her attraction to men with similar tendencies, such as the handsome Russian Karl Briullov. I say this because I could never feel for an artist who enjoyed painting women being stabbed to death, as Eugène Delacroix did, or for Picasso, who slapped his girlfriends simply because they went out without his permission. And anyway, I never liked Picasso. While people rhapsodized about how creative and ingenious his art was, I found nothing to admire about him except his ability as a businessman.

    Artists, especially painters, express themselves in colors and shapes, unlike writers or poets. I do not feel as close to their minds, and honestly I couldn’t care less, except for Michelangelo, who endured Leonardo da Vinci’s contemptuous comparison of marble sculptors to bakers. I am not trying to stage a pugilistic contest between a painter and a writer or poet, but I see no reason to be attracted to abusive men, no matter how lonely they were when they tried to be artistic by forever sulking and being uncaring. In this regard, Vincent van Gogh was a romantic man before he was an artist, with his generosity, compassion, and warmth.

    You can’t put art before man. I can’t admire the art when I don’t admire the artist. How can you separate the creation from the creator? Artists need not be saints or model citizens. But art does not absolve an artist of vice. That is why my admiration for Charles Dickens has been tainted since I learned that he tried to send his sane wife away to an asylum.

  • 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.”

  • 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.

  • 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.

    If this review moved you, you can support my writing at Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/steph79650

  • 🐾 Understanding Cats as Mirrors of My Soul

    They say pets reflect the personalities of those who care for them. The way they respond to others and express their feelings seems to mirror how they’re treated at home—or perhaps how their owners reveal the rawness of human emotion, unfiltered and instinctive.

    My two cats, Toro and Camille, mirror my ego and superego, respectively. Toro is a sensitive soul, easily shaken by the outside world and never shy about his emotions, almost like a little human. Camille, in contrast, is calm and observant. He watches me in silence, as though he sees through to the very center of me. At times, I think of Toro as the General Cat from Cat’s Eye, and Camille as Jiji from Kiki’s Delivery Service.

    Sometimes, I wonder if they are the little brother and sister who were never born—that they somehow returned in fur and paws to be near me… and, strangely, near my mother, who once chose not to bring them into the world.

    Whenever they curl beside me, their small hearts pulsing gently against mine, I feel the wonder of life swell within me—a quiet awe at its vividness, like a tide of feeling stirred with reverence for the mystery of creation, and the One who makes all things beautiful.

    Rudyard Kipling once said that a cat walks by himself. But perhaps he never met mine.

    Whatever happens, they are my familiars—silent witnesses and gentle companions, walking beside me through this strange and lovely journey of life.

  • prompt 218 on I wish I could

    Daily writing prompt
    Write about a time when you didn’t take action but wish you had. What would you do differently?
    View all responses

    It was the best of my time, the highest of my time. I had a great job back then with a great package of benefits, working in a prestigious firm in New York City. It was my gliding age. 

    I wish I could go back to that time and stay there. Then, I would not have to come to California. I was too young to understand the real world and bear the responsibilities for myself and my family. Walking away from stress on a rash decision yielding to gushing emotions was not the wisest choice. Instead, I should have taken a vacation and traveled to lovely places to relieve work stress and see the world’s beauty. That way, I could separate the work from my life, lest I should bring the stress home and spend the whole time sulking. 

    Now that I have walked for half a century, these things appear from the past, like ghosts of the dead who resist leaving this world.