Page by page, Guion uses personal experience to educate youth

Mar. 4—Two years ago, Swanzey resident Ashley Guion was trying to teach her then-2-year-old son Cooper about some of the other children at his day care, Rise for Baby and Family in Keene.

"[Cooper] was asking questions about some of the kids he was seeing there on a daily basis," said Guion, 32.

One of the children had autism, and Guion took a creative approach to explaining the condition to her son.

"I wrote up a little story about a kid with autism and tried to explain it to my son with a picture book," she said. "And that [teaching method] seemed to make a little bit more sense to him."

Guion's husband, Josh, reacted positively to the book and encouraged her to get it self-published.

She named it "Super Feelings," and it's one of six books Guion has written and self-published in a series called "Bugaboo Creek Day School," in which she portrays young children exploring hobbies, learning about health conditions and understanding the meaning of professional work.

"What a job is was a big point of contention [with Cooper], because he wanted to know why I had to leave him at day care," said Guion, a certified public accountant. "I thought there was a gap [in children's books] in the market, and I had the ability to plug it with a book series I thought was inclusive because that was really important to me."

The name "Bugaboo" was the brainchild of Guion and her husband, who were looking for a child-friendly name that wasn't copyrighted. Guion clarified that "Bugaboo" has no connection to a now-defunct steakhouse chain with locations throughout New England.

The mother of two — Cooper, now 4, and 2-year-old Owen — hasn't written just for children. She also penned a memoir called "Just Have Sex" documenting her and Josh's experience with infertility and her becoming pregnant with Cooper through in-vitro fertilization. In this process, mature eggs are collected from a hopeful parent's ovaries, fertilized by sperm in a laboratory and then transferred to a uterus.

The memoir's tongue-in-cheek title comes from the notion that parents are told to "just have sex, and you'll get pregnant," Guion explained.

However, the book is actually about her and her husband's personal hardships facing infertility, and how the couple overcame one roadblock after another. Guion said the rushed and repetitive schedule of doctors' appointments made her angry, lonely and depressed, and that the IVF process taught her to advocate for herself.

"At the end of the day, I was kind of just a patient, and I had to make sure that I stayed on top of either the insurance companies, the coordinators, the doctors or the nurses," Guion said. "[I had to] make sure that my medicines weren't getting mixed up, or that they were remembering I was doing a certain medication."

Added stress came because her experience was right before tax season. At the time, Guion was working as a CPA for Nathan Wechsler & Co.'s office in Keene. This presented a dilemma: Should she put her personal life on standby and stick with accounting work, or go through with the IVF procedures?

Guion had Cooper after about three years, which "felt like an eternity" to her at the time, but she said she recognizes that other parents may need to try for 10 years or longer to conceive.

At some point during the IVF process, the Guions considered adopting a child, prompting the question of whether to adopt from within the United States or internationally.

As they were thinking about this, she discovered a 2018 study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison that highlighted the underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) in American picture books.

The study reported that about 50 percent of picture books illustrate white characters, but only about 23 percent depict characters of varying non-white backgrounds. Guion said she found this problematic.

"It was ridiculously depressing," she said, and she worried this inadequate representation of BIPOCs would impact their adopted child's upbringing, making it difficult for them to reconcile with their race. So when Guion later took up writing her own children's books, she committed herself to featuring diverse characters in all her stories.

"I wanted characters to have two moms and it [to] not be an issue," she said. "I wanted kids to have a sibling with a disability ... or be a Native American character, or Hispanic character, all of these things."

Beyond these complex identities, Guion also writes about many other fascinating interests people have. In one of her "Bugaboo Creek" books, "Picking My Perfect Pet," she shows some characters owning snakes as pets.

"I had someone reach out and say they really loved that I talked about pet snakes, because they always felt weird for having pet snakes, and that's something we just don't think about," she said.

Late next month, Guion plans to release "Annie's Asthma Attack," which tells the story of a child who has an asthma attack at day care and whose friend Miguel sees it and learns what to do in the event of a future attack. This story is a bit personal for Guion because she and her brother both have asthma.

In fact, Guion said she still panics sometimes during her attacks, and wanted to provide a way for kids to learn more about the condition through her books. She plans to send 26 copies of the book to backers of a Kickstarter she set up that raised more than $700 for her work, with the book fully releasing around May 1.

Writing wasn't what Guion ever envisioned herself doing full-time earlier in life. While she said she was a "wicked book nerd" as a kid, she aspired to pursue accounting when she entered college, receiving bachelor's and master's degrees in the field from the University of New Hampshire in 2013 and 2014, respectively.

Her cousin Elena Farrar, 35, of Keene, said she feels Guion's writing is "really important" and comes from many experiences she witnessed her face growing up.

"It's funny to read her books as someone who has known her my whole life," Farrar said. "I was chuckling when she first came out with the '[Picking] My Perfect Pet' book because we loved our pets, and these are things I remember from her childhood".

Farrar said her partner's 3-year-old son is a fan of Guion's book "Hero Teacher Ted" and keeps repeating the lines from the story, which tells how a man chose his job as a teacher among other professions he considered as a kid.

"I feel like she has such a great lens on life. She tells a story that's relatable and that always kind of comes through with balancing honesty and perseverance, and I think that's really great for kids", Farrar added.

And Guion said it's all her fans who make her writing feel meaningful, like a 7-year-old girl she met at a vendor fair where Guion was selling copies of her books. She said the girl took on a quizzical look, pelting Guion with questions about her authorship.

"It was like an inquisition," Guion said, "[but] I could see the moment where she was like, 'Wow, you wrote those.' "

Trisha Nail can be reached at 352-1234, extension 1436, or tnail@keenesentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter at @byTrishaNail.

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