No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck
No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck
by Joan Wickersham
Released September 24, 2024
No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a poetic and philosophical meditation ignited by a beautiful, frightening, and mysterious object: the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa, which sank only minutes into its maiden voyage, lay forgotten underwater for more than three hundred years, and then was rediscovered by an independent researcher who conceived the improbable idea of raising the ship and building a museum around it.
Beginning with Joan Wickersham's first sight of the ship in the museum in Stockholm, her pieces - intimate, irreverent, urgent - weave together Vasa's story and the surprisingly personal 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 engages with 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 in its own time whose flaws made it an enduring success, a mysterious vessel both destroyed and preserved by catastrophe.
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 One Story, AGNI, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Poetry, and the Kenyon Review, and her work has been anthologized in Best American Short Stories and Best American Nonrequired Reading. Wickersham writes a regular op-ed column for The Boston Globe and her essays have run on NPR and in the International Herald Tribune. She has taught fiction and memoir at Harvard, UMass Boston, and the Bennington Writing Seminars. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
