The Mare and the Mouse

Stories of My Horses, vol. I: The Mare and the Mouse

Beautiful and hilarious, tearful and rambunctious, very real, ironic and magic-filled, Martín Prechtel’s new book The Mare and the Mouse is a series of lyrical sagas in tribute to each of the native New Mexican horses that carried him through his youth on the reservation, and then again during the difficult times following his return home after over a decade in the Mayan Highlands of Guatemala.

Meant to be read aloud to crowds around campfires, especially to people who are mistaken that only rich people or rednecks ride horses, Prechtel credits both his own physical and spiritual survival in “modernity’s mad rush to nowhere” with the sanity of riding and living with his natural-born Southwestern horses. Not raised for show, performance, status, or money, these little horses allowed a way of living that took him flying over ravines into deep-mountain Holy places, backwards over streams, and in general keeping alive a sparkier, older spirit in an age where horses have been grossly de-natured and sadly removed from our own everyday lives after three millennia as the closest companions of our ancestors’ dreams and mythologies.

But, Prechtel says, he wrote this book “specially for people to be inspired to live magically and in depth with animals, and to give people to understand that it’s never too late to start living in a more tangible, dusty way—maybe even flying over the ground on the back of a big furry animal—in a way that inspires life. If you want to have good memory, you have to do things that are worth remembering. Time to get busy!”

“New Mexico was my world when I was young and that world was big, but all the people were short and their places sparsely dotted the lands along the few rivers of our world, especially the Rio Grande. Otherwise, the great cobbly hills, tall fir-covered snowy mountains, mystic sandstone cliffs, volcanic plugs, and lava fields went on forever, wide open.” — excerpt from The Mare and the Mouse

Listen Here to an Interview Martín gave with Eric LeMay of ‘New Books Network’
as they discussed Stories of My Horses vol.1: The Mare and the Mouse.
August 5th, 2021

Give a Listen to this Interview with Ross McKeachie (Part II) of Banyen Books, Vancouver BC
Banyen Books: In Conversation Podcast on Martín’s book Stories of My Horses, Vol I: The Mare and the Mouse
October 8, 2021
or search for ‘Banyen Books Prechtel’ wherever you listen to podcasts