Join me for Deena Metzger and James Janko on March 15
STORIES OF RESISTANCE: Sunday, March 15, 12 pm PST online
Dear Friends,
Blessings to you in this time of lengthening days as we move towards the Spring Equinox. We all certainly need more light as our world totters ever more precariously. And yet, out my window in Santa Cruz the redwood trees dance with March breezes, and the young peach tree my wife Jean recently planted is blossoming wildly, as if enthralled with new life. This is not some syrupy note to cheer us up; this is simply reality, our world, before me, right now.
MARK YOUR CALENDARS! I’m writing to invite you to join me next Sunday, March 15, 12-2 pm PST online for STORIES OF RESISTANCE: A Conversation Between Writers Deena Metzger and James Janko—two amazing luminaries with urgent new books featuring women’s voices of witness and truth-telling.
I’m incredibly honored to emcee this event. Registration required: RSVP here.
About Deena Metzger and James Janko
Many of you know the work of my beloved friend and teacher Deena Metzger, a novelist, poet and healer. Through her, I recently met James Janko. I knew that Janko (as everyone calls him) had been a medic in Vietnam, had won medals which he then gave to Vietnamese victims of Agent Orange, and has written three award-winning novels. After we spoke for a time, I admired his calm, gentle demeanor, and commented, “You know, I’m just meeting you, so I don’t know your history…. are you a contemplative?”
Well, yes, he told me. He’s been a devoted practitioner of Buddhism for several decades.
I learned that this calm, wise man visited Nablus, Palestine and Tel Aviv in 2017, because he was haunted by a story he read about a circus in Galilee for Israeli children and Palestinian children. He met the members of this circus, and was deeply moved by the Palestinian children learning the circus arts of acrobatics, tumbling and wire walking while living in crowded refugee camps—and their connections with Israeli children in Tel Aviv.
Ultimately, his book THE WIRE WALKER, about about a talented sixteen-year old Palestinian girl named Amal, is simply brilliant. The voice of Amal haunts the reader, and we are given a window into the role of the arts and creativity during times of occupation and war. Amal not only physically walks a tightrope between buildings, but between cultures and histories.
Deena Metzger’s latest book, THE STORY THAT MUST NOT BE TOLD: A DEAD WOMAN’S MEMOIR, features another gifted young woman. Ina Andreae was born in post-war Germany, and as a young artist in the 1970s traveled to Los Angeles to study art at the LA Women’s Building, where she met Deena, who was teaching writing there. Ina confronts the legacy of war and remembrance as the daughter of a family of a munitions company who assisted the Third Reich and benefited economically from World War II. You can see my essay about it here.
Taken together, these two books by Deena and Janko address the role of art, resistance, witness and the generational legacies of violence, war and occupation. I’m thrilled to offer these two brilliant writers and thinkers in conversation, and featuring readings from both of their books.
MORE ABOUT JAMES JANKO AND DEENA METZGER
PURCHASE The Wire Walker
PURCHASE The Story That Must Not Be Told
RSVP HERE for this free reading and conversation.
REVIEWS
THE WIRE WALKER by James Janko
Amal (the narrator of The Wire-Walker) is Palestine’s Anne Frank. Her presence will make the world better… The ending is breath-taking.” - Maxine Hong Kingston, author of The Woman Warrior
“James Janko is a marvelous writer whose compassionate imagination spans worlds.” — Naomi Shihab Nye, author of Habibi
“It is clear that the author has fully absorbed both the facts and feelings related to Palestinians and the occupation and through empathy and imagination woven a most wondrous story.” — Mahmoud Masri, Founder of the (actual) Nablus Circus School
THE STORY THAT MUST NOT BE TOLD: A DEAD WOMAN’S MEMOIR by Deena Metzger
“…A heart-breaking, heart-enhancing ghost story of whirlwind proportions, an incantatory, ethical thriller masterfully rendered by one of our great contemporary visionaries.” - Ariel Dorfman, author of Death and the Maiden and The Suicide Museum
“The story of The Story took me completely, but also the story of how The Story is told is beyond fascinating and intriguing. I can say without question, it is the most unusual telling of Story, writ large, I can remember encountering.” — Peter Levitt, poet and author of Fingerpainting on the Moon: Writing and Creativity as a Path to Freedom
I look forward to seeing you on Sunday, March 15, 12 - 2 pm PST online. You can register here.
Blessings,
Carolyn