Joan Wickersham
From the author of the National Book Award finalist The Suicide Index – hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “an extraordinary magical mystery tour of a book” – comes a startlingly original exploration of the unpredictability of fate and the mystery of our own mortality.
No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage and lay forgotten underwater until it was found and raised more than three hundred years later.
Beginning with Joan Wickersham’s first sight of the ship in its Stockholm museum, her pieces – intimate, irreverent, urgent – weave together Vasa’s story and the associations it evokes. She addresses the shipbuilders, the divers and restorers, the men and women who drowned in the wreck and the objects they left behind: shoes and cooking pots, game boards and bones. She interrogates the wind that capsized the ship and the shipworms that failed to eat the wreck. Constantly rising up are the lingering echoes of her father’s suicide; memories of her mother’s final illness and death; and the paradoxical presence of the ship itself – an emblem of death and rebirth, a monumental failure whose flaws made it an enduring success, a vessel both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe.
No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a contemplative, strange, passionate, funny, and haunting book that both is and isn’t about the ship – a personal yet universal reckoning with mortality, and the question of what vanishes and what endures.
Cover photograph by Adam Davies. To see more of his work, visit adamdavies.xyz.
Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a National Book Award Finalist.
Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including Agni, One Story, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. For the past fifteen years her op-ed column has run regularly in The Boston Globe. She has published essays and reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The International Herald Tribune and has read her work on National Public Radio’s “On Point” and “Morning Edition.”
Wickersham has received the Ploughshares Cohen Award for Best Short Story and has been awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, The American-Scandinavian Foundation, The Massachusetts Cultural Council, MacDowell, and Yaddo. She has taught at Harvard, Emerson, the University of Massachusetts (Boston), and the Bennington Writing Seminars. She graduated from Yale with a degree in art history and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
