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

Tag: story

  • prompt 26

    What is a word you feel that too many people use?

    There isn’t one but too many words I find too many people use, and they are all about one’s mental state, often over-generalized either by sheer prejudice or highfalutin malice against the subject of the remark. Here is a list of the words that prick my high-strung sense.

    Weird is considered charming, compared to psychopathic. Anti-social is a new parlance for a witch or a woman who appears socially adroit in public. Depression is an overused excuse for being fashionably morose or rude among peers. And what about bipolar for anyone whose emotional continuum is conspicuously distinctive among melees? But the basest and vilest word is “MAD.” It’s a most convenient word to accuse someone getting on your nerve with a not-so-pleasing face or personal charms that purchase indemnity for arrogance or incivility. Simply artless and innocent it may seem, the word underlines the most acrimonious intention to call someone whom you don’t take a liking to for whatever reason. Forget the key to open your storage of vocabulary in the mind. You use the word like a hidden dagger to do harm on the spirit of the other, and the effect is often long-lastingly advsere and deeply indelible.

    Indeed, you can be mad about your lover without reason, but you can’t call someone mad just because their faces always look agelast. There may be a mad scientist but never a mad, lonely person. If all of this makes no sense, let it be a tale told by an author, full of fury and sound, signifying something.

  • Words

    The soul in exile
    it seems as it were,
    keeps no friends or foes
    but a myriad of words
    weaved into a tapestry
    of stories live to tell
    with a spark of spirit
    at the thrilled touch
    thrust in passion’s flame
    aroused from the buried
    detritus of memories bygone
    and the fire that has gone
    ablaze with the delirium
    of delight in the magic
    of the words she has found
    keeps burning the dark
    reigning in her glass castle.

  • Letters of Note: Cats by Shaun Usher

    Letters of Note: Cats is an adoringly compiled individual narrative about their cats in an epistolary form by famous people, ranging from Nikola Testa, the Romanian prodigy of the electrical invention, to the unforgettable actress of the 20th century Elizabeth Taylor, and so on whose affection for their feline babies is universally communicable across time and space.

    Of all those words from the hearts, Elizabeth Taylor’s letter to her dear cat, who went missing after being moved to a new Californian home from their Welsh home, profoundly touches my heart. Those loves, those memories, those longings all flow from artless words written in tears and project how much she misses her flurry child without florid elaboration. Her cat is not just a “pet” but a “companion” who has seen her in the saddest moment under the darkest sky without make-up. Reading her letter, I felt like I knew the actress personally, as she shared her insecurity without such a dear friend who used to stay by her side. How would I live without my two cats by my side? I would have written a similar letter to Toro and Camille.

    The creator of this lovely anthology of letters, Shaun Usher, never seems to cease his creativity, zeal, and humanity after his first publication of Letters of Note: Correspondence Deserving of a Wider Audience in 2013, resulting in a decade-long successful Letters series. I have seen musicians exhausted with their creative flairs for making new albums, either by adhering to their prior hit album music style or morphing into a different avant-garde-styled musical experiment, but not Shaun Usher, whose fountain of creativity is welled from faith in humaneness universal in all humankind. It is not to lionize or canonize Usher for the Letters series, nor to idolize him mindlessly in the heat of instant adulation as a gullible reader, whom Edgar Allen Poe might have frowned upon, but as a reader of the unique third eye that can see a writer’s true colors. So, if you love cats with hearts and like to read and write letters – okay, I will also include emails for MZ generation readers – reading Letters of Cats will be a pleasure.

  • “A Man Called Otto” (2023 Film)

    If you run into Otto on the street or in a store, your eyes will see him as a grumpy old man who would cavil at one cent for everything. But if we look at him with the mind, he is quite a character for sure, and you will fail to dislike him once you know him and his secret. He is very good at fixing machines, from dishwashers to radiators, bicycles, and cars. He is also a fine babysitter and a great driving instructor. But as God is arguably fair in evenly distributing talents in us, Otto has a hard time mastering one thing: the art of killing himself. And boy, shouldn’t he thank God for such failed experience?

    Otto is a lonely man in his sixties who lost his love of life and dear wife, Sonya, to cancer. Sadness comes not in a single spy but in the battalion, for he has just been forced to retire from his long-term job due to the juggernaut of changing generations at his workplace, as with other places. He has no children but himself, and as Sonya was the beacon of Light in his already reticent and shy life, he sees no light, joy, or meaning in life. The world suddenly turned grim and dreary. Otto is wrapped in his sorrow and besieged in loneliness under the roof of distress. We are privileged to look into the psychology of the destitute in the darkest night of the soul distressed in utter loneliness, which can be broken with a light of kindness and humor as shown by Otto’s new lively and lovely neighbors Marisol and her family. 

    Humor is a handmaid of Hope, which Otto needs on the dark night of his soul. So, as the name suggests, Marisol and her pleasantly vivacious family bring the beauty of Sea and Sun to Otto’s Dungeon of Despondency with lots of laughs followed by tears and more laughs that will make anyone harnessed with a yore of life lightened. And since Otto is secretly a big-hearted person – literally and clinically – he slowly but surely warms to the warmth of friendship and love and shows his true colors as radiantly gorgeous as afternoon sunshine showering the brilliantly golden orange trees in summer. Oh, and there is a homeless cat that seems to be Sonya’s familiar in cat skin sent by her from heaven to be his company.

    Otto is one lucky person to be surrounded by a loving community of neighbors, who becomes an alternate form of a family with emotional support and care, often overlooked and ignored by overtly advocated individualism with no face of humanity. Indeed, that doesn’t mean returning to agrarian society or something to the effect of the notoriously puritanical Salem, where everyone cast a jaundiced and suspicious eye on the targeted loner in the community, with trademark gossiping and ostracizing. Showing care shouldn’t be complicated because one can just say hi by trying to understand why the person behaves the way they are. I believe that is how we can prevent suicides by detecting sadness from the person instead of devolving the person to a therapist or counselor or ignoring them as if they were invisible or a burden to care. Just like Marisol and his family have shown, Light defeats Darkness. And everyone deserves Laughter.

  • i speak

    Look not with the eyes but with the mind

    To write a litany of daily woes is not my priority, nor do I feel proud for sure, but if I just bear it with a grin today, I may fall apart. So, I want to leave it in words. After all, I am my own counsel, defending myself against injustice and abuse forced on me just because of who I am.

    It’s been over two months since I started my new job as a case manager’s assistant at a personal injury law firm. I like my job, and I am a good worker, always willing to perform my tasks given diligently, even if I may make mistakes because I am also learning a new trade on my own. But my case manager denies this, magnifying every mistake I make as if it were fatal because she is relatively new, feeling overwhelmed by a heavy workload. She vents her frustration upon me, assailing my introverted personality, diagnosing it as a mental case, and belittling my entire personal ability and outward appearance. Besides, she mistreats me with contempt and criticism under the pretext of toughning my sensitivity. Everyday is like being in a toture room of the Inquisition.

    Today she told me I did not comprehend English very well, upsetting her. That was a massive mental blow akin to verbal abuse enough to dispirit my will to write and read. True that English is my second language, and due to my insufficient social interaction with others, my verbal expression may seem inhibited. Still, I have a BA degree in English from Rutgers University with a decent GPA, and my letters to an editor of a British history magazine have been published more than five times. In addition, my book review of a certain well-known novelist got a raving compliment from the author himself. Yes, I am proud of these facts because I love the English language and always strive to be a better writer. But to hear such a callous rant from her plunged my spirit so low that I could not help but sink into the abyss of finiteness, then into a pit of the bottomless pit. People told me to be tough, but that’s disrespectful of individualities because otherwise, there would be no poets, essayists, or novelists whose eyes and sensibilities, and senses are exceptional from the melee.

    I am so tired of all these abuses from the people who pride themselves in being the survivors of the fittest. My mind is a river of tears, and my heart is broken to pieces repeatedly. I wish I had someone who would always be on my side and support me. Maybe, it’s my fate to suffer, but I want to be happy. Is it too much to wish for?

  • Prompt 21

    What is your career plan?

    I always think that a career is for those who have social ambitions to climb up the class ladder or to gain fame, such as professionals or celebrities. As a commoner who works for bare necessities and the accompanying mental equilibrium brought by financial security, I would say the word “job” is unassumingly fitting to me. Hence I will change it to “job plan.”

    My immediate job plan is to pass my ninety days probation period, which will end in early or mid-June of this year at the current job. I am a new Case Manager Assistant at a personal injury law firm where the Spencerian of the survival of the fittest is at its most tacitly manifested and vociferously encouraged. The high turnover rate is famously average, so matter-of-factly typical that it’s like a revolving door of a department store. But the generous pay rate and timely payment compensate for the reign of terror. I have seen many the hungry ocean gains advantage of the kingdom of the shore, and the firm soil wins over the watery main with loss and gain, gain and loss. So if I get paid at a decent pay rate every other Friday, I am content. So, I pray that I will pass the probation period, and that’s all,

    I work hard and well, but I don’t want to become a case manager that is a 24-hour job under stress. I want to be an excellent CMA, competent, efficient, and prompt, and that is my prayer.