Martin Prechtel

American writer, painter, shaman, and storyteller, born 1951 in New Mexico. As a young man he traveled to Guatemala and was eventually initiated as a *Aj'Kij* (day-keeper) and full shaman in the Tz'utujil Mayan village of Santiago Atitlán, where he lived for many years and helped lead the village through the worst years of the Guatemalan civil war. He was forced into exile after the village priest was assassinated. His writing is unlike anyone else's — long-sentenced, oral, gorgeous, sometimes infuriating, always alive. He teaches that the modern Western soul is grief-illiterate and indebted to the holy without knowing it, and that a culture that cannot grieve cannot praise. Core teaching: grief and praise are the same flute, played at different ends. Tend the indigenous soul. Pay the holy back, in beauty, for what it gives you. Key works: *Secrets of the Talking Jaguar*, *Long Life, Honey in the Heart*, *The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise*, *The Unlikely Peace at Cuchumaquic*, *Stealing Benefacio's Roses*.