Our story

It began with our own family

Some businesses begin with a business plan. Ours began with a grandmother writing stories for her grandchildren.

I'm Maureen. I'm an author and professional writer whose work has been published nationally in The Blaze, American Thinker, The Gateway Pundit, PJ Media, American Greatness and Conservative Daily, among others. But my favorite writing has always come from somewhere quieter, from the heart.

Long before Once Upon Your Voice, I had somehow become a keeper of stories, in my family and beyond. I remember the funny moments, the family lore, the stories behind the photographs and the tiny details that don't seem important when they happen but somehow become precious with time.

So when I became a grandmother, I started writing stories for my grandchildren. Not stories with their names dropped into something already written. Their stories. The people they knew became characters. Pets wandered onto the pages. Houses, trucks, family adventures and familiar places became settings.

I could write them. I could see them. The problem was the pictures. I wanted the child on the page to resemble my grandchild. I wanted the dog to look like her dog. I wanted the people and places she loved to be recognizable. As technology evolved, suddenly custom imagery could meet custom storytelling.

I thought that was the idea. Then my eldest son, Murphy, changed everything with one question:

What if the book could be read in the voice of someone the child loves?

That was IT. Because suddenly this wasn't simply a personalized children's book. It was a legacy piece.

A photograph preserves how someone looked. A story preserves something that happened. But a voice preserves something else entirely: the cadence, the laugh, the accent, the tenderness. The particular way Grandma says your name. The voice that once came from another room and told you, without saying a word, that you were home.

Imagine being thirty five years old, opening the book you loved as a child, scanning a small code and hearing Grandma read it to you again.

I called Ashley. And we jumped.

Ashley is my daughter in law, married to Murphy, and the mother of my grandchildren. Before becoming an entrepreneur, she spent eight years with Enterprise and later helped build businesses alongside Murphy. Today she is raising two little girls, expecting their third child, and understands firsthand how quickly babies become toddlers, toddlers become children, and ordinary Tuesday afternoons become the days you would give anything to have back.

We complement each other naturally. I am the storyteller. Ashley brings the organization, business sense and customer experience that turns an idea into something families can actually hold in their hands. Murphy is the entrepreneur who saw the missing piece.

And behind us is something even bigger: our family and friends. Once Upon Your Voice is being built the way many family businesses are built around kitchen tables, through phone calls, with sons and daughters in law, family and close friends lending their talents, ideas, hands and hearts behind the scenes. As we grow, we want this company to grow with them.

Family isn't simply who we create these books for. Family is how we're building the company, too.

You don't come to us to write a children's book. You simply tell us about someone you love. Give us the people. Give us the photographs. Give us the memories and the imagination. We'll find the story.

Technology helps us create it. But technology isn't the point. Love is the point. Memory is the point. Family is the point.

We aren't trying to manufacture memories. Families have already made them. We're simply becoming their keeper.

Children outgrow the clothes. They forget most of the toys. And one night, without anyone realizing it, someone reads the last bedtime story.

That's the thing about ordinary moments. We rarely know which ones we'll someday ache to have back.

A voice can take you there. And now, we can keep it.