Dearest Friends

Welcome back to our Friday Note – our weekly collection of writerly thoughts. 

Observing

Today marks the anniversary of the death of John Lennon (09 October 1940 – 08 December 1980).

Lennon, best known as a singer, songwriter and musician from The Beatles, was shot dead on this day in 1980 in Manhattan.

Aside from music, his first love was art. As a teenager about to fail his O Levels, it was his artistic talent that got him a place at the Liverpool College of Art. A talent that he’d shared in his self-published newspaper, The Daily Howl.

The Beatles released three new singles since Lennon’s death, including the latest and last ever ‘Now And Then’ which uses artificial intelligence, to an extent, to finish the song. 

Reading

“...he used his own sense of poetry to guide his writing, often letting the music “flow through him””. In his career, Lennon penned over 200 songs. Read more about his songwriting process in this article on Far Out Magazine. 

Writing

Pick a Beatles song title as a starting point and see where it leads. Write the title down and continue from there in a piece of free writing for five minutes.

We’d love to see what you come up with if you’d like to share. 

Sharing

Congratulations to Dark Angels partner Elen Lewis for winning the 2023 Mslexia Short Story competition, with her story ‘It might be lonelier without the loneliness,’ and to finalist Lucy Beevor.

Both stories are available to read in Mslexia’s Best Women’s Short Fiction 2023 anthology. 

Photo by Konsepta Studio on Unsplash