John featured in New Yorker essay

John J. Lennon, who is serving twenty-eight years to life for a 2001 murder, used a Swintec typewriter to become a journalist in prison. When I visited him recently, at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, in Ossining, New York, he told me that he traded his first typewriter to another prisoner for drugs. But eventually he joined a writer’s workshop run by a Hamilton College professor, Doran Larson, and a Swintec helped him write about his life: the man he killed; a stabbing he survived; the mother who had, through everything, continued to support him.

Lennon’s cell has no chair, so, until recently, he would sit on an upturned bucket next to the bed, upon which he would place the typewriter. Lately, on account of back pain, he sits on the bed and rests his typewriter on his lap. “You’ll hear my typewriter going all day,” he said. Lennon’s Swintec allows him to save a maximum of seven thousand characters. “You have to get the first four pages solid, delete, then start the next four,” he told me. During periods when his typewriter is broken, he writes letters by hand, in a neat cursive scrawl. A few years ago, he asked a fellow-prisoner to tattoo a typewriter on his arm.

In 2013, Lennon wrote an essay arguing that gun-control laws could have stopped him from buying the assault rifle that he had used for murder. “Despite the Xanax dulling my emotions, my heart pounded when I picked up the M-16,” he typed. “A surge of power rushed through me when I felt the trigger.” He mailed the piece to a few magazines; The Atlantic published it on its Web site. “It’s a high when you get something published,” he told me. During our conversation, he started one sentence with, “When I’m out, maybe working for a magazine.” Around us, parents played Scrabble with their incarcerated sons, and children drank soda with their incarcerated fathers. “Hopefully my third act is a little sexier than my second,” he said.