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

Tag: Writing

  • 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.

  • Reading Book II of the Aeneid by Virgil

    Thursday, September 10, 2026

    I often wonder why God allows the ills of society to persist and their victims to suffer violence for no reason. What are the sins of children who suffer such violence? Why can’t he care more about changing the fates of these children? The same question arises through Aeneas in Book II when he sees his beloved Troy burning and, with a yearning heart, seems to demand an answer. If fate requires suffering, what is fate? Is God truly omnipotent and omniscient?

    Book II is Aeneas’s ballad of burning Troy—the story of his fate, which does not allow him to enjoy the ordinary life of a married man. His life doesn’t seem to be protected by the gods, even by his divine mother, who appears to her son as Venus, not as a mother. They force him to fulfill sacred pietas by carrying Troy’s future to foreign soil, where his descendants will build Rome. He tries to resist their gambit on the chessboard, where he is their number-one knight, moved around at their pleasure. Even his mother Venus is part of the divine ilk and hurries him out of Troy like a mom sending her son to school before it’s too late. In Aeneas’s mortal eyes, the idea of becoming the forefather of Rome appeals to him less than being a husband, a father, and a son at home. Can even his divine mother protect him from this fate?

    Gods are cruel just as God is cruel. They make his life easy only when he acts according to their will. Without the gods’ command, Aeneas would not have thought of fleeing the burning city with his elderly father Anchises on his back, his little son Ascanius at his right hand, and his wife Creusa following behind. But then Creusa must stay away from her husband, who has a duty far greater than his personal life. Her ghost appears and tells Aeneas that he must leave; as she vanishes into the folds of mist, all his chances of escaping his fate and its burdens vanish with her. He has no reason to stay but must move forward against his will.

    The Trojan Horse, Laocoön and his two sons engulfed by the sea serpents, and the cries of Priam and his wife Hecuba all signify the great labor of birth in the process of dying, all within the fate of a man who must act out his assigned role in the divine chess game.

  • 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 – 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