This essay is about the rewards of Pongo’s work. I hope more of you will help people to heal through self-expression. When you climb that mountain with someone, through a fog of pain to a clearer summit, there’s pride in the achievement, and closeness in the transformative moment you share.

As I’ve mentioned in this blog, choreographer Pat Graney has been creating performances in women’s prisons, with dance, writing, and art, for 15 years, as long as I’ve been working with youth in juvenile detention. I had the privilege of contributing to the writing component of Pat’s “Keeping the Faith” (KTF) this spring at Mission Creek Corrections Center.

There were two performances of KTF on Friday, May 7, and Saturday, May 8. That Friday, the performance was scheduled for 7:00 pm. At 5:00, Pat was still immersed in her creative process, making changes to the dances, waiting on costumes, and sorting through a one-foot stack of paper to choose final edited writing for the women to read. The women, who had never participated in a creative project before, much less an intensive personal and public experience like this, were walking around in shock.

Then at 7:00 the performance began. The audience was divided into two groups, one of family members and Pat’s guests and the other of fellow prisoners. The women danced and in between read their painful personal stories (many written with former prisoner Shannon Pena) and their poetry. The women cried, they addressed their families, the guests cried, the fellow prisoners cheered.

And afterward the women said that their lives had been changed.

The weekend was one of the most emotional experiences of my life. I was a very proud contributor. I wrote a poem and shared it with the women over an ice cream cake at our cast party a few days later.


Thanks for the Rose
by Richard Gold 

To the women of Mission Creek Corrections Center 

Thanks for giving me a rose
after your Saturday performance.
I was happy to help you with your writing.

You know this,
but when the audience cried and applauded you,
it was not because of the painful subjects of your writing,
about being betrayed by incestuous fathers,
or about being brought low by drugs,
or about your shame at letting down your children.
When the audience cried and applauded you,
it was because you were honest
at a level that exposed the deepest part of yourselves,
the deepest hurt that includes the deepest love.

Thanks for giving me a rose.
You gave me much more.

I was so overwhelmed by your performance
that I asked Pat if I could follow her
on the drive home.

I was so affected
that after I followed Pat to the highway,
instead of continuing home,
I followed her
when she drove off to get gas.

Thanks for giving me a rose.

This is what I want to tell you
as my good-bye.

I was so overwhelmed by your performance
that I was careless with the rose.
Sorry.
I threw my jacket over it in the back of the car.

When I remembered it on Sunday night,
I thought the rose was ruined.
It was bent over and the leaves were distorted.
But I trimmed the stem and put the rose
in water.

When I woke up on Monday morning,
the rose was beautiful,
and the first thing I thought of
was you.

I met with Shaun recently in a café near the beach in West Seattle. When I walked in, he was sitting at an empty table with his bible open in front of him. I could see that the text was filled with post-it notes and annotations, lines were underlined and highlighted, and several worn pages were ripped. Shaun and I placed our orders and soon surrounded his bible with coffee and cinnamon rolls.

Shaun McMichael has been with Pongo for three years, from his final years at Seattle Pacific University, a Christian university, to his first full-time job, working as a counselor at a residential psychiatric facility for adolescents.

Shaun is one of a fantastic group of Pongo volunteers. And because I’m interested in ideas, I set up this meeting to ask him how his beliefs, different from my own, have informed his work with Pongo. Through Pongo, Shaun has facilitated poetry about trauma from youth in foster care and in the state psychiatric hospital. Here’s a poem that Shaun facilitated with a youth in transition out of foster care. Shaun later put the poem to music to sing at the young man’s poetry assembly.

Afraid of Being Inside the House with Strangers
by a young man transitioning out of foster care, age 17

I’m in a crowd.
It’s confusing to tell who’s who;
They look like strangers.
I don’t know how to feel
With that many people in one room —
Scared, unsure of what
To do except hide.
They look at me
Like I did something suspicious,
Like I blew up a house.
I want to take
My skateboard and ride as far
As I can
And hope nobody sees me.

I do it.
Once I leave, I feel free —
Happy, not afraid.
The roads are dark,
And rainy
And open.
There are people,
But it’s not as crammed
As in that house.
Riding a skateboard
Down a hill —
It’s like a first time
Riding a bike,
That rush of wind
Feels so good
But not as crammed
As in that house
Where there’s no wind.

*****
At the coffee shop I learned that, relevant to his work with Pongo, Shaun’s Christian faith is expressed through love, imagination, and revelation…

For Shaun, love means comforting the poor in spirit, and is well expressed by listening to suffering kids, within a safe and caring relationship. As someone who has worked with adolescents in a therapeutic setting, Shaun understands that love is also a complicated gift that may require adult skills of patience, encouragement, and limit-setting.

Imagination enables Shaun to understand the metaphors of religious teaching. Imagination also helps Shaun to teach metaphor to suffering kids, as a resource for their creative insight. For example, Shaun describes a young author who wrote about Pokemon, and who eventually expressed a wish to use Pokemon powers to bring back the mother who had abandoned him. Like love, imagination can be a challenge as well, where a caregiver is challenged to imagine that a struggling individual is only a blink away from a breakthrough in her healing.

Shaun thinks of revelation in the broad sense of an unveiling. Revelation is the capacity to expose a truth that is elusive, difficult, or even painfully obvious. In this sense, revelation is a natural outcome of honest creative expression, and is the goal of Shaun’s personal writing. For Pongo’s authors, revelation through writing is a step on their path to healing.

I came away from our conversation appreciating that Christianity is a solid and unwavering framework for Shaun’s life, and that within that framework Shaun challenges himself actively and with humility. He looks within his own heart as he explores and commits to religious teaching. Shaun’s principles are unified by a desire to do good through service and to creatively seek the truth. He aspires to live his principles in every aspect of his life, while he is not comfortable, complacent, or self-satisfied. I’m grateful that he brought this effort to Pongo.

Though Pongo is completely focused on the youth in our program, there have been a few surprising times when the teens have taken care of me. I appreciate it, but I also think it shows a talent in them.

I remember working with a young man in juvenile detention who was gang involved. He wrote about feeling forced to be a man, in the gang way, by carrying a gun on the streets and dealing drugs. He wrote about not knowing any other life. On a deeper level, he wrote about not having a dad, about struggles with loneliness.  He had been suspicious of the writing at first, and we talked for a long time before we began. But when we were done, as he was leaving, he turned to me and said, “It’s very nice of you, sir, to take your time to help young people.”

Once I was leading a poetry workshop with a large group of youth at the state psychiatric hospital. After a nice beginning, they wanted to move on from the writing activities that I had brought. They wanted to write on their own, about issues that were very much on their minds. They worked quietly. And as they finished I would call individuals forward to read. While each person read, the other youth would pause, listen, and applaud, and then continue with their own work. Though I rarely become emotional while working with kids, the writing in this session was so poignant, dealing with suicidal feelings, that I started to cry. The group was calm and quiet, and one teen walked to the back of the room to get me a box of tissues. And we carried on.

It’s stating the obvious to talk about distressed teens and their ability to care. I don’t want my words to have the opposite effect from what I intend, by implying that this caring is special. A very powerful theme in the writing of abused and neglected teens, for example, is the suffering of their siblings. It’s just that, amidst the distractions that can occur in relationships between adults and youth, I find it useful to remind myself sometimes that teens’ ability to care is a source of their resilience and a foundation for good dialogue.

I remember six years ago in juvenile detention when I was introducing Pongo to a group. A young man who had previously worked with Pongo was enthusiastically describing his own writing skill and his expectation of becoming a rich and successful poet. I tried to explain that people don’t get rich from poetry, that poetry is a great way to help yourself and others. The young man insisted he would become famous, and rich. I was in some kind of mood that day, and I humorlessly persisted in saying no. I persisted. Finally I explained, as an illustration, that poetry had always been important to me, but that I had just published my first book of poetry, and I was 55.

The detention teens got excited in a way I didn’t expect. “You just published a book. Good for you!” They applauded me. “Good for you!”