On May 3, I interviewed Adair Lara after she spoke at our GaGa Sisterhood meeting. She told me about her two granddaughters, Ryan and Maggie, and their favorite ways of spending time together. She explains why humor is so important to her and why she chose to write The Granny Diaries from a humorous perspective. Adair also talks about her 20 years of teaching and her newest book, Naked, Drunk, and Writing on writing essays and memoirs.

Nancy Mellon is a therapist, teacher, and author of three books. Her newest book is Body Eloquence. She has been teaching storytelling as a healing art for over two decades and believes that stories broaden our inner knowing, our compassion, and our sense of self. They can help us nurture our own natural intelligence by speaking directly to and from every organ in our body. She believes that as we collaborate more with our own creativity, our relationship with others and ourselves will evolve with it.

Nancy believes that grandmothers have a mission to restore sanity to the earth. We can become parents again in a new way. We can take all our wisdom and see what inspiration comes to us in helping children grow up. Grandparents can have a profound influence because parents are so busy they often don’t have the time or the attention that we grandmothers do.

In the interview Nancy explains why grandmothers play such an important role as storytellers in our grandchildren’s lives.

We take so many pictures of our grandchildren, but it’s also fun to capture their sweet voices as they’re learning to talk and even sing. I got a new gadget for my iPod called the iTalk that turns it into a recording device. When I showed my granddaughter, she sang me this sweet medley of nursery rhymes. As our grandchildren grow up, it’s fun to record their precious little voices and they love hearing themselves, too.