Our response begins in the position of survivors where we will collectively build, share, and imagine spaces of healing for nuanced embodied girlhoods told through socially-engaged activities, dialogue, sharing, and performance art. Listen to the judge’s citation of her work and watch Peerbaye read from that book.Tell: Stories of a Girlhood is a live-art story-telling project exploring suspended adolescence through a performative lens examining questions of how do we collectively survive and thrive through the presence of gender-based violence? Told through multiple diverse feminist voices this is a live ‘zine’ response inspired by Soraya Peerbaye’s poetry collection Tell: Poems of a Girlhood (Pedlar Press, 2015), which examines the memory of Reena Virk (March 10th, 1983 - Nov 14, 1997) who was bullied to death on November 14th, 1997 in Saanich, British Columbia. Soraya Peerbaye’s book Tell was shortlisted for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize. Watch this interview with Soraya Peerbaye as she talks about the book that “Tide” was taken from, Tell: poems for a girlhood.

Write a poem about that person with yourself as the speaker (using 'I') that strikes a balance between objective observations (like factual details from a news report) and your own emotional understanding of their experience. This could be someone you know or someone you've heard about in the news. Think about a person whose story has moved you in some way. If you were going to recite this poem, what tone would you use? Would it change at any point in this short poem? Use our tone list to help you make your choices. What is the effect of her insertion into the poem? How would your reading of the poem change if the first line read, “Would you have seen her?” Though a reader should never assume that a poem in the first person is written from the poet's own point of view - poets often write in character, or 'persona' - Soraya Peerbaye has confirmed in an interview that she is the “I” in this poem. What details from the environment are highlighted? What effect do those details have on the mood of the poem?

How does the title inform the story? What does the word 'Tide' make you think of in this context? What part of her story is being told in this poem? She was a teen of South Asian descent who was murdered by her peers in Saanich, British Columbia, in 1997. It's helpful to know that this poem is about Reena Virk.

Tell by Soraya Peerbaye