Abby Letteri
Abby completed a PhD in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Te Herenga Waka Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)in 2025. The hybrid creative/critical nonfiction thesis took the horse in the human world as its central subject, exploring the horse-human relationship, the impacts of domestication, and the lives of domestic, free-living and wild horses today. A book from the thesis will be published in September 2026 from Te Herenga Waka University Press.
Abby's Masters thesis, down they forgot: a memoir, was published by Lilith House Press in March 2021 and re-released in 2025 by Dog's Tail Press. Abby’s poetry, stories, reviews and essays have appeared in various publications in the US and New Zealand. She divides her time between a small farm on the Otaki River where she lives with dogs and horses, and a home in town with her filmmaker husband. Life without animals is unthinkable to Abby.
Genre:
- Adult Non-Fiction
- Autobiography / Memoir
Skills:
Branch:
Wellington
Location:
Wellington
Publications:
down they forgot: a memoir
down they forgot: a memoir
by Abby Letteri
2nd Ed. published by Dog's Tail Press (Wellington NZ)
Original publications date 7 April, 2021, re-released 2025.
ISBN: 979-8-9913374-2-7
down they forgot is a memoir of an American childhood and adolescence in the turbulence of the 1960s and 70s, a time of sweeping social and political discontent. Assassinations, the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, drugs and dropping out all inform this haunting story about personal identity and the consequences of loneliness, despite the passionate and fleeting friendships of youth.
“down they forgot is a work of remarkable freshness. I admire the moral and ethical delicacy of the writing, which combines startling candour with this beautifully judged instinct to leave the mystery of personality in place. Abby favours fragments not just because memory seems to work like this but because the sort of hesitancy implied in the form is a great match for the psychology of this memorable family, where silence and looks create their own rich (and richly elusive) vocabulary.” —Damien Wilkins, International Institute of Modern Letters