James Janko refused to carry a weapon while serving in Viet Nam as a medic in an infantry battalion commanded by Colonel George Armstrong Custer III. Janko’s medals include the Bronze Star for Valor and the Combat Medical Badge.
After his time in the war, he became an iterant worker of odd jobs. He sold flowers from a cart on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, drove a truck during a Nebraska corn harvest, drove a taxi in Chicago, patrolled a Beech-Nut Baby Food factory in San Jose as a security guard, and so on. His desire for solitude led to his first long-term civilian job. He worked alone as a night watchman at the most notorious national park in the country––Alcatraz Island, for thirteen years.
Janko received a Bachelor of Science in Conservation of Natural Resources from the University of California at Berkeley and a Master of Arts in English (TESOL: Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) from San Francisco State University. He taught English as a Second Language and Spanish Literacy at City College of San Francisco for eleven years.
Janko’s most recent novel, What We Don’t Talk About, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2022.Hisnovel, The Clubhouse Thief (2018, New Issues Poetry & Prose), won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Award for the Novel. His debut novel, Buffalo Boy and Geronimo (Northwestern University Press/ Curbstone), received wide critical acclaim and two awards: The Association of Asian American Studies Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. The Wire-Walker was a finalist for the 2023 Donald L. Jordan Prize for Literary Excellence, a finalist for the 2023 Dzanc Fiction Prize, and was awarded the Juniper Prize by the University of Massachusetts Press in 2021. Excerpts of The Wire-Walker appeared in the Fall/Winter 2022 issue of Nimrod International Journal.
Janko’s short stories have appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, and Eureka Literary Magazine, among others. His story––“Fallujah in a Mirror”––won First Place in the Jeff Sharlet Memorial Award and appeared in the Spring 2021 issue of The Iowa Review. Janko is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Award for Fiction.
WHY I WROTE THE WIRE-WALKER
Several years ago, while visiting my hometown in rural Illinois, I read an article in the local newspaper about a circus in the Galilee for Israeli children and Palestinian children. The News-Tribune covers Illinois Valley news almost exclusively, so this article stood out. I’d never planned to write about Palestine or Israel. In the end, though, I write about what haunts me, what gets into my dreams and my waking, what refuses to go away.
I visited Nablus, Palestine and Tel Aviv in the fall of 2017 and read more than sixty books about Palestine and Israel before I began writing. The narrator of the first two drafts of The Wire-Walker was a white guy modeled after my father, John Janko, aka “the twinkie man of the Illinois Valley”, because his occupation was to supply local stores with Hostess cake. “The twinkie man” in my story dreamed big, sort of like James Thurber’s Walter Mitty, and his passions were circus and his belief that the arts can inspire peace in places where peace seldom exists. I placed “the twinkie man” in the Middle East on a two-week vacation, in Nablus and Tel Aviv, and allowed the story to unfold from the POV of a white male, an observer on the periphery. These drafts were a miserable failure.
Novelist Rumaan Alam referred to the last ten years of American literature as the “decade of autofiction”. The most pervasive question in literature (Who has the authority to write this story?) often leads to a simple answer: autobiography equals authenticity. Nonetheless, a fiction writer—whatever her or his background—has to write from genuine need to produce a story worth reading. Rumaan Alam again: “I don’t want to write what I’m expected to write.”
I almost abandoned the effort to write about circus in Israel-Palestine, but one night, unable to sleep, I sat down and wrote non-stop for almost six hours. The voice that came to me and persisted was soft, sometimes a whisper, yet clearer than any voice I have heard in my life. Word by word, the life of a sixteen-year-old circus girl from Nablus took over the narration and “the twinkie man” disappeared. I admire my father, his great open heart, but this was not his story to tell.
Zadie Smith wrote at length about cultural appropriation in the New York Review of Books: “…a prominent component of the new philosophy is a performative display of non-interest, a great pride in not being interested in the other, which is sometimes characterized as revenge and sometimes as an act of self-preservation. Full disclosure: what insults my soul is the idea—popular in the culture just now, and presented in widely variant degrees of complexity—that we can and should write only about people who are fundamentally ‘like’ us: racially, sexually, genetically, nationally, politically, personally. That only an intimate authorial autobiographical connection with a character can be the rightful basis of a fiction. I do not believe that. I could not have written a single one of my books if I did.”
Nonetheless, cultural appropriation has persisted for centuries and is not a thing of the past. People who’ve been colonized and enslaved and oppressed over the years want to tell their own stories in their own voices. I wrote The Wire-Walker from a POV well outside my own not to flaunt the current rules in publishing (e.g., stay in your lane, write autofiction), but to make room for empathy and imagination. Amal Tuqan, the narrator of the novel, builds bridges between disparate peoples and disparate worlds. In the early chapters, she has only an abstract awareness of the Holocaust, but by the end of the novel she sees glimpses of this most profound tragedy through the eyes of someone she loves—Rebecca Glazman. In turn, Rebecca, and to a lesser extent, Tali, her daughter, begin to see the occupation of 21st century Palestine. A funambulist, Amal walks over every barrier set before her, including the barrier that makes a sharing of stories unlikely or impossible.
Regal House Publishing is proud to publish The Wire-Walker in the fall of 2025.
