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.
ABOUT THE SPEAKERS
Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a finalist for the National Book Award that was hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “an extraordinary magical mystery tour of a book.” Her fiction and poetry have appeared in magazines including One Story, Agni, Hudson Review, Ploughshares, Boulevard, Poetry, and the Kenyon Review. 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 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.
Adam Davies is an award-winning photographer whose large-format film photography explores architecture, social systems, and public spaces, using these subjects to pose questions about place, identity, materiality, and history. Said David Tomkins, Writer/Editor of The Chinati Foundation, Marfa: “There’s an enigmatic quality to Davies’ images, and to the places they depict. The pictures bear a trace of something a bit uncanny, because the places they depict are quietly but insistently someplace else – or at least the threshold to someplace else… maybe a little magical, maybe a little cursed.” Adam is a recipient of grants from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Vira Heinz Endowment, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and has attended residencies at Chinati Foundation, Creative Alliance, Fine Arts Work Center, and Yaddo. He has worked as a Lecturer & Media Specialist at the National Gallery of Art, Washington and taught at Carnegie Mellon, Catholic, Robert Morris, and Harvard Universities. In 2015, Adam was named as Outstanding Emerging Artist at the DC Mayor’s Arts Awards and was the recipient of the Clarence John Laughlin Award. Between 2016–19, he was an artist-in-residence at Creative Alliance in Baltimore where his 2018 exhibition featured collaborations with Los Angeles-based musician Alex Zhang Hungtai and Chicago-based percussionist Adam Rosenblatt. He is now exploring the fields of woodworking and carving in part inspired by his experience from working with the writer Joan Wickersham on a project involving the seventeenth-century Swedish warship Vasa. Adam resides in Detroit, Michigan.
ABOUT THE MODERATOR
Kira Josefsson is a writer, editor, and translator working between Swedish and English. Her translations have been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and the Bernard Shaw Prize. She lives in Queens, New York, and writes on US events and politics in the Swedish press.
This program has been supported by Off Assignment.
