Mending Lives

Jane_Houng: [00:00:00] Hi, I'm Jane Hong, and this is Mending Lives, where I'm talking with people from a patchwork of places. Some have had their lives ripped apart by loss, some are in the business of repairing others brokenness, but we're all seeking to make this world more beautiful.

Vassilis Manousakis is a short story writer, poet and translator. He's written two books of short stories and three books of poetry. His most recent was published this year. It's a flash fiction collection called Tango in Blue Nights. Vassilis holds a PhD in Contemporary American Poetry. and currently teaches creative writing, short fiction, and audio visual translation at the University of Patras and the American College of Greece. His focus on human thought and behavior led him to a master's program in mental [00:01:00] health counseling. And he now holds individual and group sessions with clients, specializing in cognitive behavioral therapy and narrative therapy. Vassilis has trained in prison education with José Aguilar, an educator and expert in prison reform and rehabilitation, who is also the director of the education program in Pentonville Prison in London. As a result, Vassilis now teaches creative writing in Greek prisons. An experience which, in his own words, has changed his outlook on life. I met up with him in Athens earlier this year. [00:02:00]

Hi Vassilis, nice to see you again.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Hi Jane.

Jane_Houng: I am in Athens for the promotion of my Becky's Button project, but when we met in Nepal a few weeks ago, and you were talking to me about your writing projects in prisons. I identified you as an ideal guest on Mending Lives.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Thank you.

Jane_Houng: So here we are. And I should tell our listeners that actually you're a faculty member of the American College of Greece. You're on the teaching staff at the University of Patras.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Yes, indeed.

Jane_Houng: But a few years ago, how many years ago did you do your master's program in mental health counseling.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Around six years ago.

Jane_Houng: Six years ago. Now what made you want to do that?

Vassillis Manoussakis: My work at the university actually involved me teaching literature and poetry. And [00:03:00] explaining and analyzing characters literary characters, I mean, fictional characters. I thought I've always had this tendency to analyze and to look at people, to try to figure out what they think, how they behave, and all these things. I said to myself, okay this is a dream for you. This is a dream combination, analyzing characters, but real characters this time. So I said, why not switch from fictional to real people?

Jane_Houng: To real. And we know as writers, do we not, that when we say we write fiction, it's obviously very often you loosely based on personal experience.

Vassillis Manoussakis: I saw that gave me the inspiration to switch my career from literary teaching to mental health.

Jane_Houng: So you still write poetry and you're still teaching. So how much of your time now are you spending counselling?

Vassillis Manoussakis: I would say about 60%. of my time is devoted on counseling. [00:04:00] So I have my classes and then I have my practice, my own practice. Okay. So I'll go to the office. I see my clients and some days a week and three days a week actually. And the other two days I teach and I do other things.

Jane_Houng: Now I understand more about when we met. You asked me how I felt in Beirut because I was, I've been there for the last few days. You had your mental health counseling hat on, didn't you Vasilis?

Vassillis Manoussakis: I'm sorry. I cannot help it sometimes, you know.

Jane_Houng: Well, if you're spending 60 percent time of you doing it, and quite honestly, I told you it's painful. It's heavy. I've my heart feels heavy. I always want to go to the place where my daughter lost her life. Take flowers, I cry and then I'm thinking, okay, [00:05:00] what can I do to ensure her death wasn't in vain? So before we start about the prisoners that you work with, what do you think about that for me as a bereaved mother, is that the way to get through my grief?

Vassillis Manoussakis: It's your way to reconciliate with her death. And you paying tribute to her. You turn your grief to something for the community. And it's really wonderful what you're doing. Becky's Baton Baton's Becky's Bath House. You go to Beirut you actually visit the place which.

Jane_Houng: A lot of people don't. They're too fearful about it.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly. I'm sure it's painful, but you do it as a tribute to your daughter. And you're trying to do things to actually help people. And I really love that. And men in lives is one of them.

Jane_Houng: I don't want to talk too much about me. But I should say that the memoir that I've [00:06:00] written I am trying to get it in the hands of the perpetrator. It's a very difficult administrative process in Beirut. I felt, maybe as a mother, as a female, of course it's a, I'm a It's an incredible loss for my family, but it's also a loss for his. What about his mother? She's lost a son.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Yeah, indeed. Indeed. And it's really generous, I would say that you're trying to do that. Most mothers wouldn't.

Jane_Houng: At the funeral, I met a young woman, so maybe she was She didn't really analyze what she was saying to me, but it hit me deeply. She said, Oh, she was Italian. She said, Oh, our next door neighbor. Yeah, she lost her son. And as the years have gone by, she's got worse and worse. She's just in her room. She's wearing black. She goes [00:07:00] to church every day. And I, it was a wake up call for me. I was thinking. Gosh, yes. I mean, what am I going to do? And here we are seven years later. And I do believe, for me personally, this is a way out of the heaviness of losing a child. And as long as I'm ensuring her death wasn't in vain, as long as I'm telling young children women to take care of their personal safety as long as I'm Building awareness about sexual harassment or gender based violence. I didn't know about these things. I knew, but it didn't impact me at all until I lost my own daughter. As long as I do that, I'm okay. Vassilis said, you can take your hat off now.

Vassillis Manoussakis: I'll put it aside. Okay. Thank you.

Jane_Houng: Um, I'm particularly interested to know the work that you're doing [00:08:00] in prisons and the creative writing. I did volunteer in prisons, and I'm, I met Lifers and I wanted to do a creative writing project within the Hong Kong prisons, where you know I'm based .And it wasn't permitted, so now I just correspond with them. But tell me, what do you actually do when you.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Let me start the story from the beginning. I was, I always wanted to do something for the community. At first I was thinking to do always based or involved in creative writing. So I wanted to do something to teach people how to write and how to write this story. Because I've been trained with different kinds of therapy and most of them. actually help people rewrite their story. So I thought, why not do something for the community and help homeless, the homeless, help other people other groups rewrite their story or tell their story because their story is untold still.

Jane_Houng: [00:09:00] Now, as a writer, When I lost my daughter, I read a lot and then I wanted to write and I personally found that a very cathartic experience.

Vassillis Manoussakis: And then I, There was an opportunity for me to be trained with the director of Bentonville prisons in London. Yes. So he came to Greece to train a group of us in prison education. So he told us about all the programs that are running there. And I was really amazed and really thrilled to be part of it. So I said, okay, I want to participate. And I want to, this is my chance actually, the chance, the opportunity I was looking for. So I went to the Central Prison of Athens. And with permissions, of course, and everything you need clearance, you need passes, you need permission from the government all these things. And I had a group of 30 people, 30 prisoners to, that they came to my class [00:10:00] and we wrote together. Now, when did you first start doing this? I started two years ago.

Jane_Houng: On what kind of crime of these? Men? Just men? Or mixed?

Vassillis Manoussakis: Just men, because they are separated. They cannot be in mixed prisons. And what kind of crimes? Honestly, Jane, I didn't ask. It was out of discretion and it was part of me wanting to include everyone.

Jane_Houng: That's interesting because in Hong Kong, they have what cat A and then you just know that, that what, it's a very serious felony that they've committed. Cat B, Cat C. So in Greece, it's mixed up. You don't really know.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Mixed up. You don't really know. But through their stories I learned and I learned that some of them were were there on drug related crimes. But I had, I also had a lifer. And I had people who had killed someone. But this was all not me asking, but them telling me.

Jane_Houng: Especially if you're asking them to write, and they're really buying into this idea that it will [00:11:00] help them in some way. What do these prisoners want to do? They meet you you're telling them that it's. You're suggesting that they should try to put pen to paper and rewrite their personal stories.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly. And of course, you realize that at first they see you from a distance. They come to your class because it's time for them to be out of their cells. So that's their first motivation. But then If they see you including them, and if they see you actually wanting to work with them then they really participate.

Jane_Houng: No judgment there.

Vassillis Manoussakis: No, exactly.

Jane_Houng: Can you tell me a particular story that struck you?

Vassillis Manoussakis: Actually, there were a lot, but I will stick to two of them, which are very characteristic. One of them is that I gave them an exercise in one of our classes. There were six classes with [00:12:00] them. And in one of our classes I gave them the prompt to write about a hero that leaves in 2050.

Jane_Houng: Ah, so they could still be alive then, if they manage to get released.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly.

Jane_Houng: So it gives themselves personal hope as well.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly.

Jane_Houng: Yes?

Vassillis Manoussakis: So one or two priests, not actually, more than that, half of them wrote about a hero that works with the community, that is actually reformed. That is actually like a superhero. So they're presenting heroes like Superman or Batman, that fly.

Jane_Houng: They're men. They're men.

Vassillis Manoussakis: And of course they can fly and they can actually, and what are they doing? What are they doing in those communities then? That's the interesting part because they, they were actually helping people mend their lives to use.

Jane_Houng: Oh. Fascinating. Please tell me more about that.

Vassillis Manoussakis: And all these heroes were actually people who in the past saw that they were narrating [00:13:00] themselves. In the past, they have done something. They they actually they weren't as they were described and I'm using the prisoners words they are bad people.

Jane_Houng: And maybe they're victims of circumstance they can look be more objective when they have time to reflect.

Vassillis Manoussakis: So reflection and also self exploration So what I experienced in that class that particular class was that they explored themselves, they explored what they had in them, and then they wrote it on paper. And their stories were actual stories of themselves in the future. And what they would like to be.

Jane_Houng: And what would they like to be?

Vassillis Manoussakis: They would like to be as opposed to what they wrote not bad people but good people. People who live with their families. People who are members of the community. People who have a job. Most of them wrote that I have a job. Which for most of us is something that [00:14:00] is self explanatory. But for them, no.

Jane_Houng: Maybe they don't have the education or the jobs that they could do. . Are not worth doing because of the social security. Is that So in Greece, it certainly is in the UK.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Social security and also how they will be treated when they are released.

Jane_Houng: What are they looking for when they're released?

Vassillis Manoussakis: They're looking for to be reunited with the families. Most of them had children. And wives and mothers and the fathers and the brothers, sisters. First to be reunited with their families. And secondly to live a normal life. That's what he said. Normal.

Jane_Houng: Normal. Do you have a story of someone who didn't pay attention to his family but found the space and the silence to identify that is there.

Vassillis Manoussakis: It's very interesting question and thank you for that. There was a prisoner who actually talk to what we did was that I was his podcaster.

Jane_Houng: Hey, [00:15:00] maybe he can come on this when he's out.

Vassillis Manoussakis: And he gave me an interview. So it was like a staged interview in front of the whole class. And he we talked about loneliness. And he revealed to the to

Jane_Houng: His group.

Vassillis Manoussakis: His group.

Jane_Houng: So you've established trust there within that group. It must take some time, but so he's talking freely and openly.

Vassillis Manoussakis: It was in the fourth or fifth class that we did together. We had already established trust and sharing and non judgmental or non threatening environment. So what he did was he told me that he wouldn't he didn't want to be lonely, of course, but he didn't want to be alone at all.

Jane_Houng: When he was, before he went to prison for whatever he committed.

Vassillis Manoussakis: So he was doing anything not to be left alone in his space, in a room, in his job or whatever that was . And part of his crime was actually that he wanted to be part of the community, and to [00:16:00] fit in. And so he started selling drugs.

Jane_Houng: Alas.

Vassillis Manoussakis: It was his

Jane_Houng: Vicious.

Vassillis Manoussakis: It was his desire not to be left alone. It was his desire to to fit in in a group. He wouldn't fit in any other group, so he wanted to fit in that group. And that's how he felt the togetherness. And he felt safe. Of course he chose something that actually led to his incarceration. When he was in prison, he started seeing loneliness as a good thing. He started seeing his alone time as a very good thing. So he had the chance to think about his life.

Jane_Houng: He had time to think and self reflect, reflection. Yes.

Vassillis Manoussakis: And to think about his two daughters.

Jane_Houng: He had children.

Vassillis Manoussakis: He had children. And he had a photo of them stuck on his bed.

Jane_Houng: On the bunk bed, right?

Vassillis Manoussakis: On the bunk bed. Yes. Exactly. He could look at it [00:17:00] while lying down and to reflect on their life together. So he was expecting his release after some time. As I told you I didn't ask. And after he's released, he will be reunited with his daughters, his family. And I believe that is genuine that he won't be .

Jane_Houng: He won't commit a crime again. He realizes the value of his children and his wife. And I suppose that gives him hope. Is that what it's about Vassilis? I mean, he's just got to do his time. It must be so difficult when you're just release out into the world . But with the support of the family and friends , maybe not the old friends that he used to mix with, that there is a chance for him to redeem himself, to mend his life.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly. And so he when he looks at his daughters he actually thinks and plans his life with them. So that's [00:18:00] really liberating. And that's really something to look forward to.

Jane_Houng: Yes. Whoever we are, I'm very aware that we are who we are because of our memories, what happened in the past, and our perception of those. That is our persona, is it not? That's our ego. And I've read many cases of prisoners being in denial for years, because they've retold the story, putting the blame on someone else, or pretending it didn't happen. But actually when they're facing themselves in silence, long periods of solitude, that it is a chance to become honest with yourself. Yeah, tell me about memory, and maybe you have something to read related to that.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Yes, I think I do. Okay . The past can dictate the present . But it's the work that we do in the [00:19:00] present that will dictate the future. And if we are committed to actually change. See our lives differently work with our lives and ourselves and really have the past as a memory and not as something that actually

Jane_Houng: Jumps out like a lion to, yeah

Vassillis Manoussakis: to tell us what to do,

Jane_Houng: to wound you,

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly to wound and to tell us what we do and who we are because we can really become something else. And we can really not forget the past, but actually have it as something that is only there as part of our heritage. Of our own heritage, personal heritage.

Jane_Houng: So somehow we've got to accept, we've got to move on.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Acceptance of who we are and what we have become and the circumstances of our lives that made us who we are but also acceptance that we can really change, that we can really move [00:20:00] forward. As I was saying about that particular prisoner. He managed to change his view of something that we all experience.

Jane_Houng: Pictures?

Vassillis Manoussakis: Loneliness.

Jane_Houng: Ah, yes.

Vassillis Manoussakis: So now he knows that he doesn't have to fit in any particular groups. He doesn't have to do things so as to fit and be

Jane_Houng: in crowd,

Vassillis Manoussakis: In crowd exactly. That he can be alone. He can reflect, he can have his family, he can have have his life. So yes memory is there to remind us. But it is also there to tell us of what we can be.

Jane_Houng: You're still a poet, and you so kindly gifted me an audio visual product, let's say, which I really look forward to reading. But you also write a lot of flash fiction. Now, how much of your experience is related to what prisoners have told you [00:21:00] or insights you have gained?

Vassillis Manoussakis: Yeah. This was a life changing experience. Our first time, my first time in prison education. And I think that this will now dictate my writing as well. And will be in my writing. And I will incorporate some of the experience and some of the lessons that I learned being there and teaching creative writing to prisoners. And like we said I have a piece on memory too.

Jane_Houng: Oh perfect. Let's read. Yes, please. That's a piece of flash fiction that will be lovely.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Yeah, and it's very short. It's flash fiction So this is called Mort Subit, which means sudden death in French. This was written in Paris.

Jane_Houng: You wrote it yourself in Paris. Yeah. So you were inspired by what you saw. Please.

Vassillis Manoussakis: In Paris, everything seems familiar. Let me explain. I mean, for someone who hasn't been here before. You land [00:22:00] and then you enter the city by bus, train or taxi and suddenly you find yourself at home.

The taxi driver is the same, the hotel concierge the same, the bartender the same and the streets the same. The only thing that changes is you. You and the reasons you came or most importantly the reasons you left.

Why did you decide to come home? That's what you have to decide. All the rest has already been decided for you.

Paris was expecting you. Opened its bars for you, its museums, its streets. Montmartre knew you were coming to explore. The waitress at Café Indiana knew you were going to order a beer named Mort Subit, Sudden Death. A look in her notepad would metaphysically convince you.

Mario is now enjoying his beer, killing memory fragments one by one, causing the sudden death and laughing sardonically like the villain in the old movie. He looks around while doing it, checking if anyone else needs the same defragmentation as him. [00:23:00] He's thinking of becoming a professional memory killer, like in the movie Eraser. He's fantasizing that people would call him and he would erase their memories for a price. 5, 000 for happy memories, 10, 000 for traumatic memories. The psychotherapists would hate him. And at this thought, he let the sardonic laughter escape enough to cause the question from the waitress.

Another Mort Subit? No, he replies. I am done with my memories. She doesn't understand and goes away. He goes too. As he's walking up Boulevard d'Eclise to his hotel, a sudden thought crosses his mind.

Paris looks even more familiar for the ones with an erased past.

Jane_Houng: I love the twist at the end. An erased past. Sudden death. I like it very much. And that's what memory isn't it? I mean, you could, you can kill it, you can throw it away.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Or use it.

Jane_Houng: Or you can use it.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly. In therapy, we [00:24:00] don't try to kill people's memories. We try to use them. We try to reframe them. We try to help them rewrite their story. And they come with a specific story, a fixed story about themselves and their families and what happened to them. And then with our help, they realize that the ending of their story or the continuation of their story.

Jane_Houng: It's to be written.

Vassillis Manoussakis: It's to be written and it's to be changed as well.

Jane_Houng: It has the potential for change.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly, and it's an open ended story, we can choose our own ending or we can choose our own continuation. So that's what basically therapy is. And some aspects of it actually help that and the focus on that.

Jane_Houng: I know that you focus on cognitive behavioral therapy. I know something about that. And I read books as I'm minded to do when I lost my daughter and a certain trained councillor said to me no, that's not appropriate to you. You suffered something really big here. But Narrative [00:25:00] therapy. You say that you're also a specialist in narrative therapy. So what is that exactly?

Vassillis Manoussakis: Narrative therapy is a kind of therapy that started with systemic therapy in Australia . And what the basic idea I can summarize in one sentence is that the person is not the problem. The problem is the problem.

Jane_Houng: So you can disassociate from the process. It's not.

Vassillis Manoussakis: So it's not, you're not what happened to you. You are who you are and what have, what has happened to you or what had happened to you was something that was part of your story. it's not you.

Jane_Houng: You don't want to be known for the worst thing you've ever done. You don't want to be labeled by that.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly.

Jane_Houng: Yes.

Vassillis Manoussakis: If I may use this word, delabeling. And there's always the space that the narrative therapy gives you to actually write your own story. And first of all, narrate it in the therapy room. So first you narrated to your therapist and then you can really [00:26:00] actually write it if you're a writer or leave it, which is most people do, and it's the most important thing to do because it doesn't matter whether we narrate or write our story for other people. It's the way we tell our story to ourselves.

Jane_Houng: To others. Oh, ourselves and then to others.

Vassillis Manoussakis: So that defines who we are. It's what we tell ourselves. And if we have a story, a traumatic story, and we manage to change it, and we manage to retell it, renarrate it, then we become that story. The new one.

Jane_Houng: I lost my daughter seven years ago. I was based in Hong Kong, which is obviously not my native country. I had victim support reaching out to me from the UK and then it didn't work because they didn't have the right to make calls overseas or something. inexplicable. And then COVID [00:27:00] came. I personally haven't had that much counseling. I didn't realize that we'd be talking so much about this element. I'm listening avidly to what you say and resonating with your own story with my own story. This is very helpful for mending my own life. . And now I understand that we were in Nepal as part of the New York Writers Workshop, and of course we were talking about our writing. But the fact that you're spending 60 percent of your time on this. What's your future story? In terms of this new direction, isn't it?

Vassillis Manoussakis: a fairly new direction, yes. I believe that the people all of us should realize that the therapist is not someone who hasn't lived anything, who hasn't been traumatized. I have my own traumas. I have my own family traumas and relationships and difficult relationships with parents and everything. And I wanted to say that it's not [00:28:00] only me analyzing literary characters that led me to mental health. It's my own past.

Jane_Houng: Personal journey as well, yes.

Vassillis Manoussakis: My personal journey and my own past that I wanted like in the story that I read, maybe I want to defragment it. And rewrite.

Jane_Houng: That's a good word. Yeah. Defragment. Yes.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly. It's a computer word, but you

Jane_Houng: Didn't get it from AI, did you? No. .

Vassillis Manoussakis: No. No. . So we want to defragment our lives and actually defragmenting means, rearrange at the same time.

Jane_Houng: Like a jigsaw.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Some people I don't know if you remember that all game te.

Jane_Houng: What's that? I don't know it.

Vassillis Manoussakis: With the bricks that you had to rearrange and then they would vanish if you play that.

Jane_Houng: I dunno, that game. Okay. Is it a Greek game?

Vassillis Manoussakis: No. It is a very old game and it's a pastime actually.

Jane_Houng: Okay.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Yeah. We actually build our own lives in ways that actually work for us. So yes. The idea of rewriting and the idea of retelling is an idea that helps both the therapist [00:29:00] and the person who sits there. We are in this journey together. And all of us, I believe, that we are in the similar journey. If we understand each other and if we understand that we are not what happened to us, but we are what we will make of us, or what we will make of what happened to us. Then I believe that the future because you asked about the future. So the future of my future would be, helping people renarrate their story. To put it in a few words.

Jane_Houng: We've known each other for a number of years now. I understand that as faculty member of the New York writers workshop, you have offered the opportunity for us to come to Athens in next year, June, 2025.

Vassillis Manoussakis: May, June, 2025 for a New York writers workshop in Athens and on the island of Crete.

Jane_Houng: Oh, I haven't been to Crete, now I'm even more interested.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Maybe you should and I believe that you will come, Jane.

Jane_Houng: [00:30:00] You've given me this invitation to maybe I can come and talk in some length about Mending Lives, and maybe we could do something together, or maybe you're the organizer, I don't know, but I

Vassillis Manoussakis: No, I'm always open to ideas and I'm the organizer. Yes, because I live, I'm based here in Athens but I'm always open to ideas. And of course Mending Lives is one of my ideas for next year So definitely we will do something together and you will be able to talk about Mending Lives, which will be two years old then.

Jane_Houng: If it still keeps going and people keep contacted me saying I'd like to be on your podcast.

Vassillis Manoussakis: It's still a baby.

Jane_Houng: A beautiful baby. Let's make it a tremendous toddler . Two years old. I'd be delighted to accept. Thank you very much for that invitation and look, it's been really good catching up with you. I know it's been a bit short this time, but when we meet again, we can what do you drink in?

Vassillis Manoussakis: Yeah, have a glass of wine and then talk more about basically [00:31:00] anything about our lives. I really want to say that I love the title Mending Lives.

Jane_Houng: Because?

Vassillis Manoussakis: Because Mending Lives means that we act on it. In order to

Jane_Houng: We have agency.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Exactly. In order to mend something, you have to actually take it and do something about it. So action is really important. Acting on what has happened to us is really important. It's not something, fixing or something else, another verb that I cannot think of right now. But mending has really spoken to me. And thank you for this title, and for the invitation, of course.

Jane_Houng: Thank you for liking the title because I did think about it for a while. I had a list of 20, and gradually whittled them down. But the idea of mending, and we don't know who the actor is whether it's subjective or objective, but ultimately, we as individuals have the agency to [00:32:00] change our lives, to mend our lives if we really want to. And ultimately, it's about taking responsibility for who you are and what you've done, rather than blaming others.

Vassillis Manoussakis: Indeed. And I believe it helps people mend their own lives. Listening to other people. Listening to stories. Because as Margaret Atwood once said, the writer, the Canadian writer she said in the end, we'll all become stories. We are our stories. We are our stories to narrate.

Jane_Houng: Thank you so much for your time. I really look forward to having more chats with you in Crete, watching the sunset and lovely to catch up Vassilis.

Vassillis Manoussakis: It's the ideal place and thank you very much for the invitation. Thank you very much for today.

Jane_Houng: Thanks again for listening to Mending Lives with me, Jane Houng. It was produced by Brian Hou. You can [00:33:00] find relevant links to this show in the comments section. I would not, could not, be doing this without many people's support and encouragement. So until next time, goodbye.