Abby Palko
Previous Authors
April 20, 2020
Art by Kirsten Hemrich
Magazines have a habit of piling up at my house. I suppose I could cancel the subscriptions, but I'm a child of the 80s and, while I value finding articles on my phone and laptop, I’m not ready to give up print magazines. My budding feminist sensibilities were formed by reading my mother's magazines. I just may have had a bad habit of stealing her Good Housekeeping or Ladies Home...
November 14, 2019
The silver metallic ink may have faded a bit, but the words are still clearly visible: “For Abby ~ Travellin’ Music.” The precisely formed letters immediately evoke visions of sentences diagrammed on whiteboards, answer keys created together and shared, a teaching partnership of mutual encouragement and competition. Decades later, I wonder if either of us would have gone so far without those shared years. I suspect we would have—we were (are) both driven—but my journey would have lacked a signpost I have depended on.
It was spring 2001. I had never really failed at anything—or so I...