We here at Jasper are super-psyched for the Deckle Edge Literary Festival, particularly since so many of our staff members have had a hand in bringing it to fruition. We hope you’ll check out the full slate of events here, but particularly encourage you to come out to the Opening Night Party at Columbia Museum of Art. The opening entertainment for the evening happens to be two of South Carolina’s finest singer/songwriters, Stefanie Santana and She Returns from War frontwoman Hunter Park. The two also happen to be particularly appropriate for the literary-minded nature of the party thanks to the haunting poetry of their lyrics.
Santana, whose strong, pure vocals and adept ukulele accompaniment suggests an almost twee indie folk-pop archetype, writes with an uncommon sensitivity to character and situation. This is equally true of her most autobiographical writing, like “Liar Song” or “Grown Up Joke,” the latter of which balances parental expectations, heartbreak, and the struggles of the daily grind with a soaring repeated chorus of “I WANT TO QUIT MY JOB,” as it is with tunes where she turns her eye to the unlikely emotional cache of starfish and sea crabs. There’s something beautifully representative in Santana’s songs of the current crop of twentysomethings (of which the writer is one)—they seem to strike at the real, nuanced reality of the Millennial generation in a way that a thousand think pieces so utterly fail to do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qSbKVe-luo
Park is an ideal match for Santana. While her songs are almost exclusively focused on love and longing, there’s a poetic tendency in her writing that makes each song feel like its own philosophic treatise on the very nature of desire. “I would like a chance to travel all of the hallways of your spine/I would plant a thousand flowers and pick the petals for the rest of the time” she sings at her most giddily romantic on “Little Pharoah.” Elsewhere, she sings with stark honesty about romantic failure with equal conviction: “It seems pretty obvious we all got our poisons/be it arsenic or ether or fire on the cedar/or the telephone receiver/You know I can’t be your cure you were never mine either.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aU5D9r02bUM
Banned Books Burlesque
Hang around after the concert for part two of the night's entertainment when, all the way from Tampa, Florida, Banned Books Burlesque presents literary classics in a whole new light. Bringing beloved books like Gone With the Wind, The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter, and more, to life in the naughty ways those who’d like to ban them have portrayed, the cast of BBB guarantees a tantalizing look at censorship, great literature, and the art of the tease.
$10 admission for all three events
Find tickets at Brown Paper Tickets.