Turning lived experience into poetry
In the summer of 2022, members of the Research for Social Change Lab interviewed dozens of people with lived and living experience of homelessness in Peterborough, Ontario.
The stories these people told us informed our review of the Coordinated Access system in Peterborough, among other projects.
Since we first heard these stories, we have looked for creative ways to share them with the broader community. For example, we chose zines as a medium because we felt they more authentically captured the stories we heard than research reports and journal articles could.
Now, we are also sharing some of these stories as poems. Thamer Linklater, a graduate research assistant at the RSCL, has used the technique of blackout poetry to rework some of the transcripts of these interviews into poems.
The poems focus “on the stories of the people and the challenges they face like inaccessible services, relationship breakdowns, mental health, trauma, and jail,” Linklater writes.
To learn more and to browse Linklater’s poems, click here.