Jason Tinney, Holly Morse-Ellington, Melodie Edwards

(Cast Iron Storytelling)

(Aired 4/13/2024)

For the first half of this week’s "Open Book," my guests are the local playwrights, actors and producers Jason Tinney and Holly Morse-Ellington.

Jason Tinney(Cast Iron Storytelling)Holly Morse-Ellington(Cast Iron Storytelling)

In the second half of the show, my guest is Melodie Edwards.

Her first novel was a re-imagining of "Jane Eyre," in which she pulled Jane and her prickly love interest Edward Rochester from the mid-19th Century into the present day.

In her just published second novel, a re-imagining of Jane Austen’s "Persuasion," she’s brought Anne Elliott forward from earlier in the 19th Century into the present day in a village just north of Niagara Falls on the Canadian side of the border.

Melodie Edwards(Dahlia Katz Photography)

Setting these iconic novels in the modern world gives Melodie the opportunity to explore the ways in which the world has changed, but human nature and the intimate dance between men and women remains essentially unchanged.

But, the world has changed and the challenge for Melodie, as she wrote in an introduction to the novel, was finding a way to keep her protagonists Anne Elliott and Ben Wentworth inn the dance.