Early in her new book, No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck, author Joan Wickersham writes this about her parents: “The longer they have been dead the more I do this, reassembling the pieces of what I knew of them . . . into shapes that seem to belong to me more than they can belong, now, to themselves.” It’s a line that framed the book of poems I was about to read, a book of conversations with the Vasa, a seventeenth-century Swedish warship that sank off the coast of Stockholm almost as soon as it set sail. This is a book that asks big questions about how much—of a life, of a ship, of a memory—can actually be preserved, and what is lost or changed in any act of recovery.
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 Agni, One Story, Poetry, Kenyon Review, Boulevard, Glimmer Train, The Hudson Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Story, and her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories and The Best American Nonrequired Reading. For the past fifteen years her op-ed column has run regularly in The Boston Globe. She has published essays and reviews in The Los Angeles Times and The International Herald Tribune, and has read her work on National Public Radio’s On Point and Morning Edition.
Although this interview mostly took place over email in the summer of 2024, I think of its origin as two years earlier, in November 2022, at Joan’s home in Cambridge, MA, where we had lunch together surrounded by full bookshelves and beautiful art. Later that night, we would both attend the 50th anniversary celebration of AGNI, the Boston-based literary magazine that has published Joan’s fiction, nonfiction, and poetry over the years, including several of the poems that are in her new book. Over lunch that day—and over email two years later—we talked about the layering of time, the role of ambition and obsession in an artist’s life, the use of constraints in writing, and the rewards of seeing a project to completion, even if it doesn’t fit neatly into a single genre.
Amber Caron: There are several funny moments in this book, including parts of the prologue essay, “Before We Begin,” where you almost poke fun at yourself as the giddy tourist in Stockholm who is dragged to the Vasa exhibition because your husband wanted to see it. What follows this visit is a kind of obsessive fascination with the object and you travel back to the museum multiple times to observe it more carefully, more intimately. I wonder if you might be able to say a little more about these return trips.
Joan Wickersham: The first time I saw the ship, I was completely unprepared for the impact. You walk into the museum and it’s very dark and there is this massive black gleaming ship that seems to be coming toward you out of the darkness. It’s real and solid but at the same time unearthly, as if the ship is the ghost of itself. And you don’t know where you are. The ship does something disorienting and very interesting that has to do with chronology—a kind of layering of time. You’re simultaneously standing on the dock waiting for the ship to be launched, standing on the seabed looking at the submerged shipwreck, and standing in the museum looking at a mysterious and beautiful preserved artifact. The only reason the Vasa survived is that it was such a colossal failure in its own time; if it had succeeded in doing what it was built to do, we wouldn’t know anything about it today.
Even in that first moment I was fascinated by these paradoxes, and I kept going back over a period of seven years to try to explore and understand them.
While this project was certainly sparked by the trip to the Vasa museum, I don’t really read this as a book about the ship or a shipwreck. Rather, it seems like the ship and its wreck are more of a launching point for you to explore other things—the memory of your father’s suicide, your mother’s death. You also explore questions of what, in this physical world, is permanently lost and what might—by luck or by design—be preserved long after we have gone. How were you thinking about this balance as you were writing? And did the focus change or shift over the years as you worked on this book?
I knew that if I was going to write about the ship, I needed to learn as much about it as I could, to understand its story and its context, and to respect it as a historical object. I read a lot over the years, and spent hours hanging around the museum with a notebook and also getting to know Stockholm. I was obsessed with the story and with the city, as well as with the ship and the museum.
At the same time, the personal associations came swimming up into the poems from the very beginning. It was not that there were things I’d been wanting to write about and the ship coalesced them, but rather that the ship and the city drew out of me things that I didn’t even know were there. There was one particular Stockholm trip, in the fall of 2015, where I stayed alone in a rented apartment for three weeks and was unexpectedly hit with depression and grief over my mother’s death, which had happened seven years before. The section called “The Dry Dock” begins with some of the pieces I wrote on that trip. I thought of the ship as both a literal and a metaphorical vessel.
And yes, the focus did change over the years I spent writing the book, partly because I changed. Those ten years took me from my mid-fifties to mid-sixties—I began by thinking a lot about the shape of the ship’s life, and also the shape of my parents’ lives. And then I started to become much more viscerally aware of my own aging and mortality. Over time I came to think of the ship as a contemplative vanitas object, like the skulls and half-burnt candles in seventeenth-century paintings, meant to remind the viewer of life’s transitoriness and impermanence.
One of the many things I admire about you as a writer is how willing you are to take risks in both form and content. Most readers probably know you best as a prose writer, but this book is closer to poetry. (I say closer to because I’ve seen it described as a book of meditations. At other times, it’s described as a book of prose poems, but it also includes a few more traditional—albeit short—essays.)
Can you talk a little about how you see the form of this particular project, and how it compares to your previous books? What were the challenges you faced along the way while working on it?
The challenge for me, with each project, has been to experiment until I find the form and structure that’s right for the material. And the thing that has been most useful and freeing as I’m working is the idea of a parti. My husband, Jay, was trained as an architect. When I was struggling with the book about my father’s suicide—after working on it for almost a decade, I had come up with the idea of structuring the book as an index, but was full of doubt—he told me that architecture students at the École des Beaux-Arts were taught to come up with a design concept, called a parti, for each project. The parti is a guiding concept for the design process, which may or may not be visually apparent in the final building. He said, “Just let the index be your parti for now, and you can always discard it later if it’s not working.” But I found that it did work—the cool orderly numbness of the index form helped me to get at the inherent chaos of the experience in a way that I hadn’t been able to before.
The parti for The News from Spain was a group of stories each of which had the same title. I didn’t know when I started what the stories would be, but it turned out that they were asymmetrical, thwarted love stories, and that I was interested in the messiness of romantic and erotic feelings that we don’t necessarily express or act on.
And the parti for this book was a series of conversations with the ship and the people and objects associated with it. I began by trying to write about the ship, but very quickly realized I needed to write to the ship—to address it. It really felt like an animate object to me, so having these associative riff-like conversations with it seemed much more natural, and less flat-footed, than trying to explain and narrate in prose the associations it was sparking for me. One of the most helpful comments I got was from a friend who read the manuscript fairly late in the process and said he thought it was like a cubist painting, where the ship is the object the painter looks at and shatters.
I love this idea of the parti and it has me thinking a lot about the role of constraints and how they can paradoxically free us to explore. But it also makes me wonder how you decided on the order for the pieces?
I experimented a lot with the order of the pieces and also with which pieces to include. It was a kind of a Goldilocks process: When it was too logical and orderly, it felt dull and overly earnest, and when it was too chaotic it felt artsy—discourteous to the ship and the reader. I ended up structuring it in five sections—the first introducing the ship and its story; the second moving into the museum and the artifacts it contains; the third focusing on my mother; the fourth allowing the associations to get wilder and more far-flung, with new perspectives and reconsiderations of what has come before; and the last section looking mortality in the face.
Another example of you constantly pushing artistic boundaries: After five years of working on this project, you invited the photographer Adam Davies to collaborate with you on it. Together, you and Adam have done online events and exhibits. One of Adam’s photographs is on the cover of the book. You’ve said in other interviews that watching Adam observe and photograph the ship allowed you to see it in a new way, to pursue new avenues in the project. What did that collaboration open up for you?
I loved working with Adam, and I loved the collaborative exhibits we created. We’d like to do more of those.
It was challenging at times to find a balance between the shared aspects of the project and the solitary aspects. The poems are very interior and personal. I had been completely solitary and private about this project for five years; I’d been lurking in the museum, as a visitor with a notebook, and reading on my own. Once Adam was involved, we had to introduce ourselves to the museum, to get permission to take photographs. But it turned out they couldn’t have been nicer or more welcoming. They gave us all sorts of access that I wouldn’t have dared to ask for—to storage rooms and archives, and even to the ship itself. I found that these experiences sparked new and unexpected pieces of writing for me. Adam and I spent a lot of time just hanging out and talking; we became friends, and I think our ways of seeing the ship bled into each other in some respects and stayed individual in others.
He has a bold yet meticulous eye. Something that he and I have in common is that we both like working within very tight parameters. For me this tends to be formal and structural; once I have the parti of a project, I can let it contain messy and uncomfortable emotions. For Adam, the parameters were the camera itself—he works with a large-format view camera using only natural light—and the physical limitations of the museum. This gigantic ship is being held captive in this dark enormous space where there’s almost no light. You can’t photograph the ship without also dealing with the building.
Like me, he was fascinated by the city, and we would go on long walks—on one of these we found the dry dock where the Vasa was brought after they rediscovered her in the mid-1950s. We applied and got permission to climb down into the dry dock, and spent an afternoon there. I began a piece about my mother, and Adam took what is one of my favorite photographs in his series.
This question might take us in a slightly different direction, but I’d love to ask you this and see if it sparks anything for you. As you were working on this project, you published a long essay (fifty pages) called “Mortal Enemy.” It came out in Ploughshares Solos and it explores an adolescent friendship that takes a dark turn. It is an astonishing essay, and although it is very different from No Ship Sets Out To Be A Shipwreck, I do see some overlap in the way it explores how the past can come to haunt the present. Sometimes this haunting is quite literal—this friend obsessively calls you; he shows up on your doorstep uninvited, after traveling for seven hours by train. But this haunting also manifests in more psychological/emotional ways for you—although you want him out of your life—for good—you also feel this pull to untangle the threads of this friendship. I wonder if you see any overlap between the material you explore in this essay and the material you explore in this book?
That’s an interesting question. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I think you’re right that there’s some overlap. Certainly one of the big themes of Vasa’s story is how grandiosity and hubris turn into humiliation. The essay is about a friend whose grandiosity was partly his personality and partly his illness. As I wrote the piece, I came to realize that ambition is something I’ve been afraid of in myself, and that I squelch it because I equate it with grandiosity. For me, shame is an emotion that often charges my writing. In The News from Spain, I was wrestling with whether one’s own strong romantic and erotic feelings are something to be ashamed of or something to be treated with dignity. I think I was trying to do something similar in both the shipwreck book and the long essay: work out whether ambition is something to be ashamed of or honored.
The other thing that the essay shares with the Vasa book is that both keep circling back to reconsider and reinterpret earlier events. The older I get the more I’m aware of how perspectives can—and should!—shift over time. The essay also took years to write; I began it just after getting the news that this old friend had died, and my view of him changed as I wrote. There’s a kind of layering—lots of different, maybe contradictory, things all being true at once—that can happen with time and revision.
I wonder if we can talk more about ambition. I see it at play with the Vasa, which has multiple layers of ambition. There’s the ambition of the shipbuilder, who constructs this wildly extravagant warship that is taken down by a gust of wind just minutes into its maiden voyage. There’s the ambition of the explorer Anders Franzén, the obsessive scholar and fisherman who fails for what seems like years before ultimately finding the ship three hundred years after it sank. And then there’s the ambition—and missteps—of the various osteologists who try to recreate the skeletons from the bones that are recovered from the shipwreck, and even the ambition of the museum directors and their efforts to preserve this ship by constructing a museum to hold it, monitoring light and moisture levels in the building. But you also seem to be referring to a writer’s ambition–both yours and your friend’s—and what can and can’t be preserved, recovered, or reconstructed through language. So this just makes me wonder where you land on your own question after writing this book and your essay: Is ambition something to be ashamed of or honored?
I wish I could say unequivocally that it should be honored. I want to honor it. The hard thing, though, is that for a writer ambition and vulnerability go hand in hand. All the craft in the world is no good unless you really delve honestly into something that obsesses you, and true obsessions are deeply personal and weird and risky.
Amber Caron is the author of the story collection Call Up the Waters (Milkweed Editions) and the recipient of the O’Henry Prize, the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, Southwest Review’s McGinnis-Ritchie Award for fiction, and grants from the Elizabeth George Foundation and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Best Short Stories 2024: The O’Henry Prize Winners, PEN America Best Debut Short Stories, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, Bennington Review, Southwest Review, Longreads, Writer’s Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at Utah State University and an assistant fiction editor at AGNI.
This post may contain affiliate links.
