Ashley Moyé

   When I was in first grade, I was frustrated with the material that we were expected to read.  It was all “See Jane run” crap.  My teacher and I eventually duked it out, after I told her that my intelligence was offended by the book that she had demanded I read aloud in class.  Our debate landed me in the principal’s office.  All I told her was that I wasn’t retarded and that I wanted to read Shakespeare!  Well, unless it was the few choice words I called her….

   Anyhow, it wasn’t my intention to write a children’s story, prior to my car being rear-ended in May of 2024.  Ironically, as I drove home that day, I was looking forward to returning to my deep-dive edit of a novel I first drafted in 1993.  Suffice it to say, after suffering a concussion, I was highly motivated to regain my creative talent.  So, about two years later, it was while I was on my way to my speech therapist’s office that I thought I could try writing a children’s story, while I therapeutically created alternative neural pathways to compensate for the damaged areas of my brain (i.e., rehabilitating my creative thought processes).

   Initially, I was only able to brainstorm for fifteen minutes at a time (that’s per session), not thinking that I would ultimately end up having something marketable.  I just wanted to get back to baseline, so I could finish the edit for my future magnum opus.  Turns out, I think I do have something marketable.  I also think that I fulfilled my childhood wish, which I had expressed to the principal who told me to respect my teacher.

   Naturally, I can understand why the principal had told me that my reading Shakespeare would be inappropriate when I was just six years old—too mature for my psychological development.  But, with the gradient of the vocabulary and storyline that I developed with this new children’s book series, The Adventures of Pretty Penny and Green Bean!, I’ve since realized that this is exactly what I would have loved to have read, back when I was in the first grade.

   So, here it is.  From a real human’s head (and I’ve got a speech therapist as a witness).