On October 8, join us for a discussion with Joan Wickersham and Adam Davies to celebrate the release of Wickersham’s No Ship Sets Out To Be a Shipwreck, a poetic and philosophical meditation inspired by the Swedish warship Vasa, out now from Eastover Press!

Launched on August 10, 1628, the Swedish warship Vasa sank only minutes into its maiden voyage, and lay forgotten underwater until it was found and raised more than 300 years later. In 2021, ASF Fellows Joan Wickersham and Adam Davies created Scandinavia House’s first-ever digital art and literary exhibition, Conversations With a Shipwreck, which responded to the legendary ship through presentations of Wickersham’s poems and Davies’ photography, exploring themes of memory and oblivion, permanence and impermanence, mortality and time.

No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck is a collection of essays and poems that are contemplative, strange, passionate, funny, and haunting that is and isn’t about a ship—a personal yet universal reckoning with mortality, and the question of what vanishes and what endures. In today’s program, Davies will present his photography of the Vasa followed by readings from Wickersham from the new book. Last, they will discuss their work with the Vasa in a conversation moderated by writer, editor, and translator Kira Josefsson.

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