Abby divides her time between a small horse farm on the Kapiti Coast of New Zealand’s North Island and a home in Wellington with her husband Joe, a filmmaker and astrophotographer.
Horses hold sway, but Abby is also passionate about writing and the art of letterpress printing. She has worked on and off for many years as a printer’s devil at Wai-te-Ata Press. There she has learned to compose, print and bind fine handmade books.
Abby has a Masters in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Her poetry, stories and essays have been published in literary magazines and anthologies both in print and on-line.
Abby shares the farm with her daughter, a classics scholar and fellow horse woman, and eleven horses, two dogs and a geriatric cat. Life without animals is unthinkable to Abby.
Have you got yours yet?
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…
Vacations
for Ivanie Mae Down Joslin (August 1930 – March 2000) When I was very young, my family took an annual vacation. There was never a destination, no Disneyland at the end. We travelled by car, leaving at dawn, my mother riding shotgun with the big road atlas spread open next to her on the bench…
Schoolmaster
I woke that first morning in Katikati to birds more riotous than the ones in my own trees at home. I padded to the dark kitchen and made tea by the glow of the kettle switch. My hosts were already up and out, feeding the horses, mucking out. We had a busy day ahead so…
Horse. Farm. Life. 