Abby Letteri

Abby's thesis is a collection of essays which consider the lives of horses in the human world and interrogate the consequences of domestication and use.

PhD awarded 2025

Abby has a Masters in Creative Writing with Distinction from the International Institute of Modern Letters, Victoria University of Wellington (2005). Her Masters thesis, down they forgot: a memoir, was published by Lilith House Press in 2021. A second edition was released by dog's tail press in 2025. Abby's poetry, stories, reviews and essays have appeared in various publications in the US and New Zealand, including What She Wrote: An Anthology of Women's Voices (Lilith House Press, 2020), Turbine and the Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books. She has recently written for Concordia International Equestrian Magazine and the British Horse Society. Abby divides her time between a small farm on the Otaki River where she keeps several horses, and a home in town with her filmmaker husband.

Abby writes: 'Waiting for the Light: Considering the Horse in the Human World is a hybrid thesis which interweaves memoir alongside critical commentary in exploring different ways of seeing horses and rendering that experience in creative nonfiction. The braided essay form, together with shorter prose pieces, uses the close observation of horses, readings from literary, historical and scientific sources, and personal accounts to document how horses have been perceived in the human world and how this has affected their lives.

'While researching and writing—and most importantly observing—I came to better understand who horses are and what matters to them. To do so, I found it necessary to unharness horses from the many stories, desires and presumptions with which we saddle them (these metaphors excruciatingly apt). I began to understand the horse’s telos, the unique traits and powers that allow horses to function and thrive in the environments for which they are adapted, and how the "horseness" of a horse includes other horses, because sociality, the herd, is a defining characteristic of their lives.

'In addition to observation of my own and other domestic horses, the thesis also charts my field research to observe wild and free-ranging horses living in various ways outside the confines of domesticity. My travels took me places I never imagined I would go: to the Outer Hebrides, Iceland, Mongolia, and to various locations in the US, Italy, the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand. I write about the unique adaptive behaviours—the cognitive, social and emotional lives—of critically endangered Eriskay ponies, of Exmoor and Konik ponies in conservation grazing schemes, and many others. I was privileged to observe the last truly wild horse, the takhi (Equus ferus przewalskii) living precarious but fully wild lives in their ancestral homeland, the Mongolian Gobi Desert.

'During the course of my research, I developed an observational practice combining art and science to shape the essays as a kind of creative ethology, a way of seeing and understanding horses and rendering that on the page. While my thesis resists a formal conclusion, my research has led me to reconfigure my own relationship with horses, and to try to overturn the dominant narratives of the horse in the human world, which often fail to question the fundamental assumption of the use of horses for human purposes. I write on behalf of horses and yet I write through a human lens; I can't speak for horses, only of them, an unresolvable paradox which I explore in my creative work.'

'Animals aren't just repositories for human meanings, even if we unthinkingly use them to reflect our own selves and concerns. They are always more, always reminders that the world does not exist for us alone. They resist us. Behind all of our human clatter, they are entirely, and perfectly, themselves.' - Helen MacDonald