Table of Contents

Editorial Review Board
Series Overview
Foreword
Preface

1. Childhood Trauma and the Benefits of Writing
2. Pongo, Openness, and a Unique Joy
3. The Special Role of the Writing Mentor
4. Poetry as the Expressive Medium
5. The Pongo Approach to Teaching Poetry
6. A Model Pongo Writing Project
7. Keeping Everyone Safe
8. Introducing Poetry to Youth
9. Overview of the One-on-One Process
10.Taking Dictation
11. Improvising Poetic Structures
12. Using Fill-in-the-Blank Activities
13. Overview of the Group Process
14. The Challenges of Group Process
15. Publishing Teen Poetry

Epilogue: Next Steps
References

About the Author

Richard Gold, M.A. of Seattle founded the Pongo Teen Writing Project, a nonprofit that offers unique therapeutic poetry programs to adolescents who are homeless, in jail, or in other ways leading difficult lives. In its 17 years, Pongo has worked with over 6,000 teens. The Pongo web site contains writing activities for distressed youth and resources for teachers: www.pongoteenwriting.org. Prior to founding Pongo, Richard was managing editor of Microsoft Press. In 2010, Richard was named a Microsoft Integral Fellow, honored for his work with Pongo, by Bill and Melinda Gates and the Microsoft Alumni Foundation. A book of Richard’s illustrated poetry, The Odd Puppet Odyssey, was published in 2003. In this book, the character Pongo is a puppet who struggles awkwardly with becoming human, until he aspires to compassion.

Reviews

Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method provides a roadmap for therapists, counselors, and teachers to help troubled adolescents transform their lives through poetry. Both wise and pragmatic, Pongo reminds us that healing is art; that listening, validation, and respect are core elements of therapeutic relationships; and that human connections underlie our most basic needs and our most rewarding experiences.
*Jack McClellan, MD. medical director, Child Study and Treatment Center; professor, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington*

Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method makes a wonderful contribution to our collective response to youth affected by trauma and hardship. Facing up to trauma experiences and developing a new narrative is proven to work for recovery. Expressive writing is an amazingly powerful method of doing just that. This book helps youth to find their voice, learn their strengths, and give themselves hope for their future.
*Lucy Berliner, MSW. director, Harborview Center for Sexual Assault and Traumatic Stress; clinical associate professor, University of Washington School of Social Work and Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Seattle, Washington*

Richard Gold’s creativity, compassion, and empathy, coupled with his deep sense of the integrity of the human spirit, has allowed healing and restorative expressions to flow from adolescents who have experienced profound emotional traumas. The Pongo Method is essentially a way for these young people — many with severe emotional problems and some who have been ensnared in the juvenile justice system — to learn to communicate and think about their life experience through poetry and storytelling. Many are able to reframe horrific experiences and put some closure around 'issues' that they have held back from feeling and thinking about. Although the Pongo 'process' is not therapy in a traditional sense, it represents the essential elements of the most effective treatments and does this through a modality that youth can engage in with honesty and trust.
*Eric Trupin, PhD. professor and vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington School of Medicine; professor and director of Division of Public and Behavioral Health; director of Evidence Based Practice Institute, Seattle, Washington*

For even the seasoned teacher, working with traumatized children can be intimidating. Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method not only inspires teachers to help these youth write poetry but also provides clear instructions on how to facilitate the work — all while taking care of these children. It proves an essential tool for anyone with the heart to take on this important vocation.
*Teri Hein, executive director, 826 Seattle, Seattle, Washington*

Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method is a step by step guide in understanding the minds of at-risk youth. By following a carefully planned writing program the guide helps the instructor liberate youth from past trauma. The road to recovery is bumpy, but this guide can make their journey smoother.
*Charles Shelan, CEO, Community Youth Services, Olympia, Washington*

I have had the pleasure of working with and learning from Richard Gold, with his remarkably creative and effective method, in our work together with incarcerated youth and adults. He is a superb clinician and teacher, and I recommend this unique book, Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method, to anyone who chooses to work with this underserved population.
*EK Rynearson, MD, clinical professor of Psychiatry, University of Washington School of Medicine, Seattle, Washington*

For many years as an incarcerated youth, writing was my principal method of venting in a highly constrained and rule-governed environment; and now as an adult working with incarcerated youth it is more clear to me than ever how powerful a tool writing can be for youth going through that experience….By the time I reached the end of the book I was convinced of the potential for empowerment that can come from Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method. That marvelous poetry is there locked inside these troubled youth; the method is clearly effective in helping them bring it to the world.
*Starcia Ague, program coordinator, University of Washington, Division of Public Behavioral Health and Justice Policy, Seattle, Washington*

Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method is a toolbox for transformation, an incredible resource for all disciplines serving youth.  Richard Gold's method for expressive writing provides an instructional pathway to meet the immediate needs of youth in distress. It introduces youth to a lifelong vehicle for coping and introduces practitioners to an intersection of best practice and meaningful human connection.
*Heather Wilson, founder, Youth Arts Alliance, Ann Arbor, MI*

Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method collects Richard Gold’s more than 20 years spent working with troubled youth. In it I hear his voice and everything he told me when I volunteered for him as a writing mentor in Seattle’s juvenile detention. This book is a clear guide on how to apply his expressive writing methods in any setting, but his thoughts and stories about the work remind us how transformational it can be for young people who need this empowerment the most. For my own trauma-serving poetry project in Sacramento, founded with Richard’s guidance, this book will be required reading for all of my future poet mentors.
*Alex Russell, founder, Real Poets Writing Project, Sacramento, California*

Writing with At-Risk Youth is an understatement of what the Pongo Teen Writing program does. Pongo works and writes with youth who have been buffeted by unimaginable trauma, the most challenged and troubled children in juvenile detention and psychiatric facilities. This extraordinary book does two things. It teaches others to do what Pongo has done so successfully: get distressed youth to express themselves in ways that ease their burdens, reflect on themselves and their families, deal with overwhelming issues that are hard to discuss in therapy, and write amazing poetry. And, in describing the Pongo Method, this book tells the stories of these children in their own words. Richard Gold writes with the pen of a writer, the understanding of a therapist, and empathy that reflects his broad experience and compassion. The method is simple and creative. I have seen the transformation and pride these youth experience when they show a judge a poem they have written with Pongo, and hope this book will foster widespread use of Pongo's methods.
*Barbara A. Mack, Judge, King County Juvenile Court*

Richard Gold’s Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method is a treasure chest of practical tools and profound inspiration in one book. Representing extensive years of Gold’s dedication and creativity, the contents offer the therapist a variety of methods — narrative poetry, fill-in-the-blanks, ‘what if,’ and other brilliant exercises — to engage at-risk youth in ways that ordinary dialogue cannot. The responses of the young people reveal their worlds of both horror and hope, of injustices and overcoming, of pain and compassion. The genius of the method leaves not only youth better off, but the professional user as well.
*Jane Parker, PhD, MPH, LCSW. clinical associate professor and director, Institute for Psychosocial Health, Tulane University School of Social Work, New Orleans, Louisiana*

Sadly, the juvenile justice system has become the dumping ground for youth who have mental health issues or a history of trauma or both. All incarcerated youth are suffering. That suffering will find expression: positive or negative. Writing with At-Risk Youth is a user-friendly book that offers a pro-social, holistic, and low-cost solution.
*Will Harrell, Ombudsman, Youth Studies Center (detention center), New Orleans, Louisiana*

In Writing with At-Risk Youth: The Pongo Teen Writing Method, Richard Gold shows that writing can enable youths to process trauma and thereby gain a measure of control over its consequences. He offers concrete techniques for working collaboratively with youths to cultivate writing skills, as well as methods of addressing the challenges arising from that intervention, while making clear its abundant rewards for educators and mentors.
*Raphael Ginsberg, adjunct professor, University of North Carolina, Correctional Education Program, Chapel Hill, North Carolina*

In Writing with At-Risk Youth, Richard Gold takes on the incredible task of demystifying the teaching of poetry for at-risk youth. The book is a straightforward, beautiful, and heartfelt how-to for educators of any age…and a testament to the compassionate tools Richard employs in his own teaching approach, as well as the tenderness he feels toward emotionally troubled youth.
*Pat Graney, founder, Keeping the Faith/The Prison Project, Seattle, Washington*

[T]he world of Pongo poetry, writes author Richard Gold, 'is about... tuning into an underground river of unarticulated emotion, that rumbles and roars just beneath the surface of our world. We can feel it through the soles of our feet, when we attend to it, and it shakes us.' In these pages Gold carries the reader deftly into this subterranean realm, in which carefully crafted expressive writing provides soundings from the hearts of troubled teens who are helped to write with startling depth and honesty. By following the Pongo model, writing mentors and counselors can help young people hear and share their own emotional truths, and participate in the seismic shifts they foster.
*Robert A. Neimeyer, PhD, Editor of "Grief and the Expressive Arts: Practices for Creating Meaning," Professor, University of Memphis, Memphis, Tennessee*