Join us for a book talk with author Joan Wickersham as she discusses her book No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck  in conversation with author Suzanne Matson.

In this nonfiction/poetry hybrid, Wickersham meditates on a 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.

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.

Saturday March 15th | 1pm | Free with registration | Tickets 

ABOUT JOAN: In addition to No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck, Joan Wickersham is the author of The News from Spain and The Suicide Index, a finalist for the National Book Award. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as many magazines. She is a regular contributor to The Boston Globe, where her op-ed column has been running for the past 15 years.

ABOUT SUZANNE: Suzanne Matson’s two volumes of poetry are Sea Level and Durable Goods, from Alice James Books. Her four novels are The Hunger Moon, A Trick of Nature, and The Tree-Sitter, from W. W. Norton, and, most recently, Ultraviolet, from Catapult. She also has a forthcoming work of nonfiction from Duke University Press called Winnowing, about our personal and cultural relationship to “stuff.” She is a recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the American Scandinavian Foundation, and was the 2023 Finlandia Foundation Lecturer of the Year. Originally from Portland, Oregon, she attended Portland State University, the University of Washington, and is an English professor at Boston College, where she co-directs the Creative Writing Concentration.

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