Electric Mermaid Live Reads: Featuring Wendy Donawa @Char's

Date:

Wednesday, March 25, 2026 - 6:00pm to 8:00pm

Venue:

Char's Landing

4815 Argyle Street, Port Alberni

Contact:

[email protected]

Electric Mermaid Live Reads Featuring: Wendy Donawa @Char's

Wednesday March 25th 2026 doors 5:30pm open mic 6-8pm

LIVE YouTube Video => https://youtu.be/gdax338L-5Y

Victoria poet Wendy Donawa was raised in Victoria, but subsequently spent almost four decades in Barbados, where she studied, taught, and worked as a curator at the Barbados Museum. Returning to Vancouver Island, her focus turned to poetry. Either way, the salty air off the Salish Sea and the Caribbean’s Easterly winds make equal claim on her spirit. She is a reader for ARC Poetry Magazine and active in Victoria’s Planet Earth Poetry. The Time of Falling Apart is her third collection of poetry.

Arleen Pare says “If you care about language, if you care about story…a strong and engaging poetic narrative…fearlessly tracks what’s at stake for almost all of us.”

Susan Alexander speaks of “…philosophical playfulness and rich vocabulary that teaches as it pleases….such sensual pleasure here, you can almost taste her poems.”

Please visit her at www.wendydonawa.com . She’d love to read for your bookclub.

BIO: The Time of Falling Apart is Wendy Donawa’s third poetry collection.

Born in Victoria, she spent 36 years in Barbados as educator and museum curator, and has returned to her birthplace on the unceded territory of the the lək̓ʷəŋən Esquimalt and Songhees nations.

In a voice that shifts from ironic and quirky to contemplative and speculative, The Time of Falling Apart follows the speaker through the inevitable passage of memory and time, and a search for meaning in a world rife with injustice Here are the social hells of racism, war, colonial violence, and homelessness.

Here are despair over a damaged earth and grief over nature’s destruction. Yet here also are wonders of the earth’s small beauties, of love and compassion, and the unfathomable mystery of the cosmos.

Elegiac, meditative and unwaveringly kind, this collection is for anyone who has felt unable to reconcile the implacable passing of time, but determined to recognize love and beauty wherever they may be found.

Books are available in Victoria at Munro Books and Ivy’s Bookstore, and from publisher www.harbourpublishing.com.

And hopefully at other bookstores! Victoria Public Library and Saltspring Library carry the book too.

MARCH 25th READERS' LIST

READER 01 Jenn Wenn 5min Via Zoom (London ONT)

READER 02 Linda K Thompson 5 min in Person (Port Alberni

FEATURE 01 Wendy Donawa in Person 20min+ 10minQ&A (Victoria B.C)

READER 03 Kacie Trott 5 min In Person (Port Alberni B.C)

READER 04 Roberta Vandermeer 5min in Person (Port Alberni B.C)

READER 05 Peter Van Paul Camp 5 min Via zoom ( Denman Island. B.C)

READER 06 Stephen Novik 5 min In Person (Port Alberni B.C)

READER 07 Lesli Omohundro - Bronczkowski (Germany)
READER 08 Vicki Drybrough 5 min in Person (Port Alberni B.C)

READER 09 Atma Frans 5 min via zoom (Gibsons, BC)