Joan Wickersham "No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck" w/ Kelle Groom

Joan Wickersham "No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck" in Conv. w/ Kelle Groom "How to Live: A memoir-in-essays"10/19 at 6pm - Boston Bookstore

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, 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.

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 with the question of what vanishes and what endures.

About Joan Wickersham:

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.

"How to Live: A memoir-in-essays"

"Is home the place you left, or the place you are now? This is a central question in this fiercely won, wildly original, and ultimately beautiful meditation. Kelle Groom is one of our most gifted writers, and this book is her Odyssey, which means we will end up back where we started, only changed. Along the way we will visit strange lands, we will come face-to-face with our fears, we will find ourselves among kind strangers, and we will understand why we are alive. This is a book which wrestles with our hardest, darkest questions, and comes out on the side of gratitude."

"At its simplest, this is the story of a restless search for a place to be- a way to live- after a series of devastating events. But there's nothing simple about it. Kelle Groom has created a marvel: a haunted, haunting, beautifully sustained dream of a book."
-Joan Wickersham

Kelle Groom, an NEA Fellow and Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Prose, is author of the award-winning memoir, I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl, and four poetry collections, most recently Spill.

Host or Publisher East End Books Ptown