Guy adds titles of author, TV show host to resume Owensboro native's book goes on sale Monday; TV program airs today on Louisville station

At this rate, Leah Guy will need to add at least one more page to her resume. The Owensboro native living in Jersey City, N.J., can now include author and TV show hostess/producer. Her TV show, "A Girl Named Guy," had a limited opening last week and airs at 4:30 p.m. CST today on WYCS Channel 24, an independent station in Louisville. Her motivational book -- "Life's a Gift ... OPEN IT!" -- comes out Monday. Some of the artwork was created by Guy, working alone or in collaboration with her boyfriend's 11-year-old daughter. "I've always loved to paint and draw," Guy, 35, a 1990 Apollo High School graduate, said in a phone interview. She modeled, acted and managed a health-food store before starting "It's All About U," an Internet TV show about health, wellness and conscious living, in August 2005. Guy launched www.agirlnamedguy.com, a free lifestyle-and-wellness Web site, in July 2006. "It's been growing. Now, it will be focused on supporting the TV show," Guy said. The Web site will rebroadcast the 30-minute TV shows, she said.

"It's more like a more-fleshed-out version" of the seven- to 15-minute Internet "webisodes," Guy said. An investor interested in www.agirlnamedguy.com made the TV show possible, she said. Filming on episodes began in April in Savannah, Ga., Asheville, N.C., and Floyd, Va., a tiny southcentral town in the Blue Ridge Mountains known as a haven for artists, musicians and craftsmen. Eight episodes for the 16-week first season are done, Guy said. One will include a segment about cancer survival that was shot in Louisville. It will air Dec. 9. "We may come back to Kentucky and do a show about biodiesel fuel," Guy said. It might be shot in Henderson in the spring, but she was unsure of the broadcast date. Guy also writes a weekly letter from the editor for www.modernsage.com, an "e-zine" geared toward women that talks about parenting, wellness, fitness and spirituality. Her company, A Girl Named Guy Productions, produces it and published the hardcover, 30-page book that sprang from her weekly writings on www.agirlnamedguy.com. "I started writing the book a year and a half ago and didn't know it," Guy said. Guy said she was encouraged to put them together in a book but found it a difficult task that she compared to creative childbirth. "I always wanted to write a book but it was an overwhelming project," she said.

Writing was a form of self-therapy, a way to get outside her own head and teach herself life's lessons, Guy said. "It comes from a place I think everyone has," she said, referring to a "higher self." The book contains Guy's inspirational and motivational musings that are intended to help free people emotionally, she said. Guy wrote about the gifts of love, time, choice, a child-like heart,dreams, the unknown, pets, letting go, seasons, companionship, age, experience, grace and growth. The chapter on letting go -- of "toxic relationships," anger, sorrow, ill feelings, "clothes that don't fit" and other issues that hampers being able to move on -- was the most meaningful, she said. "A lot of those were hard for me to write. I'm just as vulnerable and messed up as anyone else," Guy said.

Everyone has had "negative things that happened," she said. For her, that includes broken relationships and being assaulted at age 21. "It's always a challenge to get through those things," she said. "The fear of letting go prevents the freedom of living a richer life," she wrote. "By letting go, we are allowing ourselves to trust in the present. We have faith that what we need is already here." Guy hopes readers will contribute their stories about things that have happened in their lives that they now see as a gift. They will be included in the next installment in about six months, Guy said. "The idea is for the book to be a series," Guy said.

In her acknowledgments, Guy thanks her mother, Cheryl King of Owensboro. It is dedicated to father, Rick Guy of Owensboro, "who has taught me values of the heart, of humanitarianism and of unconditional love."