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

Tag: writers

  • Sunday Letter – 2

    Sunday, September 6th, 2026

    Hi Freddo,

    It’s September, and fall will arrive soon. In fact, the cooler temperatures are already its harbingers, and I am all for it. How’s the weather in Rome? And how are your projects coming along? Last time I heard, you were working on a translation of a certain book from English into Italian. Are you still working on it? Can you tell me what the book is about?

    I want to show you my prose poem I wrote yesterday. It’s one of my recent experiments with story-like poems. I write poems that read like prose. The best thing about prose poems is that there is no complication of characters with existential dilemmas and metaphysical questions about who they are—questions that not many people care about. But these days, too many poems and stories can read like ideological catalogs, social agendas, or personal traumas that are not easy to read and take to heart. While I get that shared traumatic experiences may help those who find themselves therein, that is not my cup of tea. I don’t want to write about my ethnicity or race in the context of living in America as an Asian immigrant woman. I don’t want to be labeled as an “ethnic” woman writer whose work is shelved outside of the so-called mainstream book sections in bookstores. That is why I admire someone such as Kazuo Ishiguro, who wrote The Remains of the Day. His background does not prescribe the consciousness, subject, or voice he is permitted to inhabit; you would not necessarily know that a Japanese-British man wrote it in posh British English. There are no boundaries of race, gender, or age in the language of the mind and heart. You can be whoever you want to be and show the world the way you are.

    Today’s letter reads like a rant from an anxious woman irritated by a boisterous party of popular or best-selling writers. So be it. I do not want to be restrained in the realm of written words where I can be myself. I do not like being boxed in by what people expect me to be and write, because that is not who I am. You would find it a bit hard to relate to my literary zeal to write the truth about myself because you would not feel the pressure of ink in your own color, but that is okay. I do not expect you to understand my stance. However, I would be incredibly happy to see you on my side when people scoff at my poems and prose.

    Dreaming of a dusk on the Aventino Hill looking over Rome with you,

    Stefania

  • 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

  • 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

  • About Writing

    I can’t think of myself just simply vanishing into the passage of time, becoming a tribe of the forgotten. I don’t want to leave this world without a trace of my existence. That is one of the reasons why I have been submitting my work to journals and my first poetry chapbook since last May. Before, writing was my soliloquy in which I wallowed myself away from the cruel reality where God was unkind, let alone people. However, things have shifted for me. Now, it’s different. This is a time of striking hard when the iron is hot. And boy, is my iron so hot that I can’t hold it any longer.

    My first chapbook, “The Glass and the Flame,” consisting of 40 poems, was submitted to a couple of presses last week and this week. One of them required $15.00 for submission, which was quite costly considering that even if my chapbook were not selected, I would still have to pay the sum, just so the editors would read. Still, I decided it was worth it because I wanted to be famous. I want to mark my name in the aisles of bookstores from LA to Rome, to Paris, and wherever literate people live. Not vanity. Justice. My voice deserves to be heard. I write ache, loneliness, sorrow, and desire — with no shame. For whom should I feel shameful about expressing a free spirit in the language of beauty and truth? After all, even scholars have sex. No, my writing is not of Anaïs Nin. Instead, my writing follows the tradition of Anne Ernaux, Duras, and Sappho with the mind of Szymborska. Furthermore, elsewhere across the fields of desire, Plath calls for intelligent lust, which comes in the form of Eros in a purple cloak. And of course, Psyche comes in together. In the secret garden of language.

    I have received rejections from journals that tout themselves as publishers of so-called “intellectual,” “confessional,” “existential,” or “societal” poems that demand social activism. Writers are routinely defined by their social, racial, and cultural backgrounds, as if these alone drive their voices. For example, if you are a Korean-American woman from an immigrant family, you are expected to address prejudice and alienation, tinged with jingoism. The prevailing belief is that my race and gender are the only traits editors value — as if being an “exotic” woman seeking an audience is enough. God, when will they realize that, beyond differences, we share more in common?

    Maybe this is just a writer’s rant. If so, so be it. Nevertheless, I write the most universal human feelings about love and desire, about solitude and sorrow that any woman across all cultures, ages, and classes can understand. Forget the MFA writers. After all, writers do not need master’s degrees to be considered intellectuals whose work takes precedence over writers who have lived rather than studied.

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

  • Chasing Shadows: The Cycle of Love and Loss

    Ariadne, Dido, and Clytie—

    ancestors of the tribe called Beautiful Losers.

    Their loves were alone, half-met,

    steeped in the clandestine ache of disappointment.

    Spring meets Summer.

    Summer elopes with Fall.

    Fall yearns for Winter.

    Winter chases after Spring.

    The cycle of lovers’ tales.

    Some loves are born to be forever chasing.

    Even beauty cannot possess the souls of the beloved.

    Votives of curse are lit for Hecate.

    Still, Ariadne found herself

    in Dionysus’ arms—god of wine and pleasure.

    Dido let Aeneas touch her aching love in a cave.

    Clytie burned for Helios,

    who left her for a mortal princess.

    But I am chasing the shadow of his past,

    the ghost of a lover no longer himself—

    his eyes, the blue sky—so beautiful, so sorrowful

    they puncture my heart with helpless longing.

    I write his name on papyrus,

    seal it with the candle’s tears,

    and burn it in the quiet flame,

    calling his name within.

    The doors of time close.

    Candlelight flickers in the wind of the hour.

    Wistful images of his face—young, old—

    even those I would forget, I cannot forsake.