The Iguana Speaks My Name: Plus Ten Backyard Stories From Panimache Paperback - 2012

AUTHOR BIO Roberto Moulun (1924-2013) was a treasure of the small village of Ajijic, Mexico, on the shores of Lake Chapala. He lived and wrote there in the shadow of the many writers who once resided and also wrote there, including D.H. Lawrence, Tennessee Williams and Norman Mailer. But his writing, unlike theirs, sings a Spanish song of place, people and slice-of-life events occurring on the plazas of Guatemala, Mexico, or in imagined places of his creative and sensitive mind. These are characters we come to know and to love as Moulun did, each one bearing facets of beauty, grace and often mysterious behavior. Whether they be doctors, spies, whores or charming gypsies, their beauty and their lives enthrall us. Moulun captured life as it is in this book, and although each story is a gem all are connected in the delightful word necklace he has conjured up for us. His pen moved slowly when he wrote, he told us, and the reader is the beneficiary of his cautious and creative magic. These are short stories that live and linger long after the read. They are composed by the master who fathered them word by word, sentence to paragraph...all to make us laugh or weep or love. Above all, to love. Born to a Spanish mother and French father in Guatemala, Moulun received his undergraduate B.A. and B.S. degrees from Instituto Modelo, Guatemala City, and his medical degree from the National University of Mexico, Mexico City. His residency and post-graduate studies were are Seton Psychiatric Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and at the Menninger Foundation, School of Psychiatry, Topeka, Kansas. After completing his residency in 1962 he moved to Hawaii and was Chief of Services and Psychiatric Supervisor at Hawaii State Hospital, Kaneohe, Hawaii. During his professional career in Hawaii, Dr. Moulun was a man of many accomplishments: successful psychiatrist, university faculty member, champion blue-water sailor, member of the diplomatic corps from his native Guatemala, and a volunteer mental health specialist for the America Red Cross disaster team. After closing his practice in 1988 he lived briefly in Guatemala and Spain before returning to Hawaii in 1991, where he became a volunteer for the American Red Cross mental health disaster team, reaching the rank of specialist, and served in ten disasters in the USA and foreign countries. In 1999 he retired and moved to Ajijic, Jalisco, Mexico. He died in September 2013 in Ajijic.