The writer John J. Lennon will have you know that he killed a man in New York City in the winter of 2001. He will not rationalize it, will not explain it away. He will have you know this fact again and again, in essay after essay because he believes the reader deserves to know why he is writing from prison.
Lennon, who is serving a 28-year sentence, is one of the most well-known leaders of what some have called a renaissance in prison journalism. His writing on life behind bars has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post and The New York Review Books, among other publications.
“My career is at the mercy of your forbearance,” Lennon wrote in an essay for Esquire titled “The Prisoner and the Pen.”
Last year, he published his first book, “The Tragedy of True Crime,” which tells the stories of three men and the spiraling, chaotic histories behind their violent crimes. Throughout, Lennon threads his own volatile life before prison into the rich and sometimes disturbing portraits of his main subjects.
The book is a master class in confronting the question that looms over so much writing from prison: Why are you there? Lennon’s approach is to be a sober witness to the terrible things he and his subjects have done. He does not insist on the need for forgiveness. Instead he situates the crimes committed by his characters and himself in the long arc of their complicated and contradictory lives, hoping that the unvarnished truth keeps readers turning pages.
Over the phone and through electronic messages, I spoke with Lennon about both the need and difficulty of reckoning with one’s crime in writing, and in life. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
— Mason Bryan, editorial director
Q: Have you always started from the premise that your honesty and transparency about your past enhances trust with readers, or is that an understanding you came to over time?
Lennon: In the first op-ed I ever wrote — which I started in a writing workshop inside — the piece opens with: “It was swift and cowardly.”
I’m describing my crime. So I think it was kind of intuitive at that point. Even though I was in a workshop, I wasn’t really being guided on: this is how you hook a reader, this is how you pace a piece, this is how you do this.
I felt like I had to almost get this important fact out of the way, but also explain to the reader that I have agency with this awful thing that I did, and here’s why. And with that agency, I could do something good with it.
The people in my workshop didn’t really see it — why this was important. When I told them I was sending the draft to The New York Times and The Atlantic, they weren’t like, “Yeah, an editor’s totally going to see that agency and appreciate your honesty.” But I had a hunch that transparency was a tool that would give me credibility.
Q: Why do you think your classmates were reluctant or skeptical about your transparency?
Lennon: I think they thought: “This is not how to be credible to readers. People are not going to want to hear that.” Or they were uncomfortable with their own crimes and weren’t really at the point where I was.
Look, murder is not just murder, right? It is a crime, but you have to contextualize it. The facts and the situation of each murder are often quite different. I always write about it declaratively, not sentimentally. And I’m not looking to rationalize it. I’m just giving you the facts. This is what happened. This is what I did. This is the context of the lifestyle I was living at the time. And this is why I did it.
And I think about the external reasons why I did it. Then later on, when I became more mature, I got to more of the internal motivations. Because there’s always both.
But I didn’t start on a really introspective level either. I got help from editors who called me out. One of the first pieces where I started grappling with it more deeply was a piece I wrote for The New York Review of Books. It was about Jack Abbott and how I felt about him. In early drafts, I was a little glib with how I wrote about my own crime. I was angry and righteous. And my editor basically said: “You sound like you’re romanticizing a lifestyle, John.”
And that’s where growth happens. That feedback is not going to come from corrections employees. It’s going to come from editors.
Q: If you’re advising an amateur writer in prison, what would you say to them about this need for transparency?
Lennon: There are different situations. For example, in a piece by my friend Robert Lee Williams, who published with PJP, he grapples with his friend who overdosed. I asked him at a certain point to let the reader know why you’re in prison. I told him, I understand the piece is about you getting very close with your friend and then him dying of an overdose. But if you want to publish in the mainstream, readers are going to want to know.
I don’t care if you’re writing about prison food or prison slavery or addiction in prison or your friend dying. You’re asking people to spend time with you. And especially in the mainstream, if you’re asking them to spend time with you, the least you can do is answer the question they’re going to want to know.
You have other scenarios where guys have these really long sentences. Joey Sanchez is in my writing workshop. He’s doing 50 years to life, and has a wrongful conviction claim in the courts. He writes about being a jailhouse lawyer. He has to be more careful because he has open appeals and post-conviction motions. So he can’t just come out and say: “Hey, I did this crime.” What he can say is: “I was living this particular lifestyle. I was a criminal. In many respects I’m the maker of my own troubles.” So he can sort of write around it.
What I’m trying to say is: Learn to tell the story in a succinct way where the reader understands you’re being as candid as you can.
Q: As a general practice, PJP does not insist that writers disclose their crime, unless it is germane to the subject of an article. Sometimes somebody’s writing about how to make the best prison burrito. In that case, I’m not sure our audience cares about how the writer landed in prison.
Lennon: With the burrito example: If you don’t want to challenge the writer because your audience doesn’t need it, OK. But if they’re pitching somewhere like Esquire, with millions of readers, I will tell you for a fact that an editor is going to want to know what the crime was. Or they’re going to look it up themselves.
And I actually think it’s OK for PJP not to force the issue in certain contexts because maybe it’s not relevant for the publication or the audience. But if you already know what the crime is and you know the writer wants to publish more broadly, I think it would be a disservice not to figure out how to address that editorially.
Q: Can you say a bit more about those moments when editors challenged you?
Lennon: I think we’re talking about a piece maturing while you work with an editor. And we maturing as writers in the process too.
For that New York Review of Books piece I mentioned earlier, that was my first draft, and I was describing my crime in pulpy prose. And first of all, The New York Review of Books doesn’t publish pulpy prose. Some places I wrote for around that time did. But in this piece I was trying to dig deeper. My editor was basically saying: “This delivery isn’t working here. We need another emotional beat. We need you to internalize this more. We need to tone down the action.”
Having editors call me out also helped me take a deeper look at how I felt about what I did. Not only did I become a more fully developed writer, I became a more fully developed human being.
I hope people find that outside person who will call them out when they’re not grappling with something they should be grappling with.
Q: There is a certain maturity — and courage — required to write about yourself. It takes time to get there. I can imagine people reading this conversation who’ve never really talked about guilt or shame or their relationship to what they did. What do you recommend people do to advance that process?
Lennon: If you’re trying to advance that project on the page, in a published piece of writing, understand that it’s very personal work. The first piece where I really grappled with this deeply was “The Apology Letter” in The Washington Post Magazine. That was grueling to write. It was about writing an apology letter. It was about identity. Am I the murderer? Am I the journalist? How do I live with what I did?
But for people trying to move toward this kind of writing, I would say: Be open to edits. When we’re first starting out as writers, we’re at a pretty delusional stage. And prison has a lot of know-it-alls. You can think you’ve got it all figured out. But I would be very careful about falling in love with your own writing and your first drafts. You probably need an inflated ego to believe you’re going to knock it out of the park immediately. And I’m guilty of that too.
But if an editor says, “Hey, I really want to work with you on this,” then you’ve won. Then get ready to do the hardest work of your life.
Q: You’ve made clear that mainstream media are going to require transparency about an incarcerated writer’s crime. Is it naive to imagine a world where that’s not the status quo?
Lennon: In the world you imagine, it seems as though readers won’t have an innate curiosity about the darker parts of society. I don’t write for my reader, but I try to consider them when I write — their warped instincts and desires to be drawn to the darkness. This is what makes us all human, for better or worse.
In my most recent feature in Esquire, “Happy Mother’s Day, from Prison,” I explained that, when I was young and running the streets, I never anticipated this part of the punishment: all these years later, watching my mother die slowly of Parkinson’s, and all alone, as I sit in prison.
A Baltimore criminal court judge named Ralph Sapia recently wrote me after he read the story in Esquire. He liked it, and called it “deeply human, restrained, and honest without casting blame.” And then he went on: “I regularly find myself wondering whether I am accomplishing something meaningful or simply warehousing human beings so they can ‘do time.’”
This is the kind of reader I’m able to reach, and that’s at least in part due to my willingness to write frankly about the murder I committed and the devastation it caused in so many lives.
Q: What about the people who won’t become writers? When it comes to conversations where they need to talk about prison — with employers, on applications, in interviews — what advice do you have for them around transparency and accountability?
Lennon: I would always say: Write and express yourself in the active voice. “In 2001, I shot and killed a man. And I’m deeply remorseful for that. I’ve thought about that a lot over the years.”
“I shot” — that’s active. But it’s not pulpy. That’s just active and declarative.
What I would not do is passive voice. “A life was lost.” “A body was found.” That is terrible writing and terrible speaking. And a lot of prisoners absorb passive language from legal briefs and decisions. We think that’s good writing because lawyers write that way. But lawyers are trying to avoid implicating you in guilt in those documents. They’re doing a different job. They’re writing statements of facts. But don’t emulate that.
Own your shit. The body wasn’t just found. You murdered a man and left him in the street. That’s what happened. And you live with that.
