Hi. I’m Suzanne & I write FLORENCE.
My books of poetry & performance include NEW SUTRAS, TOUT VA BIEN, & (with a friend) DO YOUR OWN DAMN LAUNDRY. I have been a publisher of poetry chapbooks (TAXT PRESS), a film curator & gallerist (FOUR WALLS) and I was the founding editor and for almost a decade editor-in-chief of OPEN SPACE (r.i.p.), a hybrid platform for art & writing published through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
I took a little (3+ year) break, and now I feel like writing again, in public. Training myself to write again, in public. FLORENCE is my space to do that. But what?
What I think about a lot right now is whether or not, or how, that bio I just gave you (↑) still pertains to me. Transitions & transformations are real—I want to write about that. I’m a longtime student of the Vedic sciences, a trained Ayurvedic wellness counselor and a yoga practitioner, possibly I will write about that. Maybe I want to write about consciousness. Creativity & ease, and how to find it. (And why.) Emotional resilience and harmony, and how to find that. What else? Communities, performances, objects? This weird-ass town I live in now (San Diego, CA), the perturbing glory of middle age? Possibly I’ll share bits from my archive of earlier writing, or from editorial or curatorial projects. Maybe I’ll point you to things. Maybe we’ll collaborate in future?
Or none of the above. FLORENCE will find its form. Rhythm and frequency TBD.
Subscribe! I want you to. I’d love to write for you. This into-the-inbox form is intimate & fun.
If you want to know other things about me, visit suzannestein.net. If you want to order my books, go here, or here, or here. If you are interested in reprinting my first book TOUT VA BIEN, hit me up. It’s utterly unique, out of print and impossible to find, I would love it if more people could check it out. And here’s a thing you can listen to — but not while driving!
Why “FLORENCE”?
From French Florence, from Latin Flōrentia, from flōrens (“flowering, flourishing”), from flōs (“flower”), connected with English bloom and blossom.
FLORENCE is named for Florence Sylvia Stein, née Kramer, my Russian-Romanian grandmother. She was fierce, vivid, stylish, confrontational, started painting in her 50s (“and enjoying sex!” she told my aunt), played classical piano, & suffered from lupus and bouts of madness I have sometimes wondered didn’t have more to do with finding herself with a husband and a young son when what she wanted was her free fierce vivid creative life. She considered Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive” her personal anthem because she woke up in her hospital bed hearing it on the radio and made a wild recovery. She did love her children, and her grandchildren, also fiercely, and she hated her name, til she learned it was the name of the most beautiful city in Italy. Florence asked me to keep a secret once, and I’ve never uttered it to anyone, ever. She died when I was 14, having never really recovered, they said, from the death of her son, my father, the year before. My grandmother Florence, according to me: magnificent, challenging, & fragile, an artist in the truest sense of the word, one of a kind. I adored her & adore her still. I ask her to guide me here.
