The moment she felt that life inside her, Eurynome tarned into a dove, and she flew and she flew and she flew through the dark night with Ophion at her side, until she came to term.

MELANIE: I definitely feel like a member of more than one group thanks to my work. A group of two first off. Nan and I have now got very intertwined lives. At one point it looked like her husband might get a great job in Victoria and we were trying to imagine how we would cope -- would I move my family with hers to Victoria? Or would I commute? Or would he? We try to consult each other on decisions of importance. We both sometimes feel hampered by the presence of the other. We have to pay attention to dynamics between us.

There are also the "group" of Wives' Tales, the larger group of our two families, and the loosely-knit group of storytellers and listeners. I feel connected not only to the people I know here through telling, but also to those in Prince George, Toronto, Seattle, and elsewhere. I belong to the Vancouver Storytelling Circle and I care about its continued vitality. Partly this is self-interest because I know it's a good way to build my audience, but a lot of it has to do with enjoying the people who enjoy storytelling.

NAN: Storytellers are mostly very nice people. I feel very much at home in the community of tellers, in a way that I never felt among actors. It is important to me to feel that I am a member of a group -- even a group of people whose interests are otherwise as diverse as storytellers.

Then Eurynome laid a gigantic silver egg on the surface of the waters, and she said to Ophion, "You keep this warm." Ophion wrapped himself seven times around the egg and held it close until it hatched.

MELANIE: Our audience is multi-faceted. Their ages range from children in their first school years to seniors in homes. I like to think they are people who look for more in life than the surface glitz the media say we want. People who like the sound of the language as well as the sense. Jolly people. People with feelings they like to know about. It is a very humane art and I believe it attracts people with large and questing hearts

NAN: My personal relationship with my audience is almost always very warm. I feel delighted when I know I have pleased an audience. I'm very fond of them. And more than once, a person in an audience has been a lifeline for me. The first time I told a story l'd written myself, I felt like a swimmer in the middle of a lake making for a shore I couldn't see -- the end of the story. The audience was small and scattered, and it was hard to gauge their reactions. But one little girl near the front was following every word, and the light in her eyes, the concern and pleasure alternating in her face, gave me the confidence to go on. Whenever I felt panic, I'd look at her. So you see, it can be a very intense relationship.

When the egg broke open the sun and the moon and the stars come whirling out, and the glorious Earth herself, and the Earth was already perfect, clothed in growing green, and all the creatures that crawl and swim and fly and run and love were already living there, in harmony.

MELANIE: We manage to make a very modest living as storytellers. And I am profoundly grateful to the universe that this is so. But I am also very tired of it being so very modest a living!

NAN: Everything seems to cost so much these days! But the work is growing, and we are getting better, and better known. Sometimes I worry about money. I say to myself. "Here I am, I am so and so old, I earn only such and such, I'm not famous, blah, blah, blah." But you see, I enjoy my work. Sometimes I sit back and think how lucky I am to be an artist -- the thing I have always wanted to be. My life is very good.

In the beginning there was nothing and no
one but Eurynome.

The quotes for Eurynome are from a story written
by Nan Gregory based on a Greek legend.

Nan Gregory heard her first stories from her father at bedtime. She is the mother of One and the Wife of another, and her favourite place in the world is Moresby Island.

Melanie Ray, has told stories since she and her sister were little and in bed too early to sleep. She lives in Vancouver with her teenaged daughter in co-op not far from the beach.