It Ain't Easy Tweeting Green #bookfanproblems

If I successfully managed to upload the photo I just took, then what you're seeing here is a well-preserved letter that Beverly Cleary wrote to my 9-year-old bookworm self in response to the fan letter I had written her.  Though I have no idea what brilliant words of praise I surely must have written in my letter, I still remember to this day the feeling of elation I experienced when I received Beverly Cleary's note.  The fact that I have kept and displayed it for over 20 years should tell you how meaningful it was to have received a personal response from the author of books as beloved as the Ramona books were to me.  Without a doubt, getting that note is one of the most memorable moments of my lifelong love affair with books.

It might surprise some of you to know that until this week, the fan letter I wrote when I was 9 was the only fan letter I'd ever written in my life.  (And by "some of you," I mean anyone who was friends with me circa 1998-2002 when I may or may not have done things like spend ridiculous amounts of money on fueling an obsession that may or may not have involved constant message-boarding, borderline-creepy scrapbooking of Brian, Nick, and Kevin, or the making of a really awesome Backstreet Boys music video parody that ended up being chosen by MTV to air on TRL as the first fan video ever played on the show and then praised personally and on air by Carson Daly while he held up an equally awesome and colorfully handwritten fan letter that accompanied the video.  Again, all of that may or may not have happened).

This past week, it occurred to me that writing to an author is very different from writing to a musician or an actor or a sports star because most authors aren't visible to their fans.  In other words, most authors can walk down the street and not be recognized.  While fans of actors or singers tend to know minutiae about those celebrities' lives, authors tend to be enigmas whose Wikipedia sites don't really have much personal information about them.  And perhaps most interestingly, authors can be ugly/unkempt/uncoiffed and still be loved.  So I really believe that when fans take the time to write to authors, it's more about the art, not about the image, and there's something pure in that relationship between reader and author. 

Last week, my sophomores read a new novel called The Fault in Our Stars, written by a contemporary author named John Green.  I had first read this novel this past spring after one of my former students whose taste in literature I trust gave it 5 stars on goodreads.com, and his taste didn't let me down--the book was phenomenal.  For those of you who haven't read it, it's an uplifting heartbreaker about two intelligent and hilarious teenagers who fall in love in a cancer support group.  As soon as I finished it, I knew I had to share it with my students.  It's been awhile since I've introduced a new text, so I wasn't sure how it would go over, but my kids absolutely loved it.  They were so into it and excited by it that many of them broke my #1 rule of Not Reading Ahead because they simply couldn't stop.

I always have my students write a journal letter to me after finishing a book because I like to know what they think individually and also like to give them a chance to say things they might not have had the opportunity to say in our discussions.  The letters they wrote about The Fault in Our Stars in particular were a joy to read because their enthusiasm for the novel was boundless.  I will share the link with you if you'd like to see them, though I suggest you don't read them too carefully if you're planning to read the novel.  TFiOS letters

After we wrapped up the book, one of them came up with the idea to write to John Green, and the idea became a plan.  We would all send him messages on Twitter to tell him we'd all bought and read his still-in-hardback book and that we were big fans.  Our hope of course was that we would get some sort of acknowledgement--a retweet or maybe even a response.  When our initial tweets didn't garner any kind of response, we organized a mass Twitter session.  I had copied all of my kids' journal letters into one document, so I tweeted the link to John Green, and then last night at 6:45, 25 of my 29 students got on Twitter all at the same time and retweeted my tweet and tweeted their own messages to him.  One of my students also shared the link on a site called reddit, and by the end of the evening, over 450 people had opened the document and looked at their letters.  But nothing from John Green.

I have to say I was disappointed not to have heard back from him, and today at school, the kids were also very disappointed--they'd been so sure that our organized efforts would bear fruit.  What's most disheartening to me is that the vast majority of my students unequivocally loved a novel so much and were so invested in what was going on inside our classroom that they felt compelled to reach out to the author, and they were in a sense rebuffed.  I understand that he is very busy and that maybe he wasn't available last night at 6:45 when we all tweeted him, and I understand that maybe the random girl he responded to today who also loved his book was just luckier than we were. One of my students just sent me this screen shot:

Sigh.  In any event, I do continue to hope that we'll hear back from him at some point soon.  After all, we haven't given up.  We have a Plan B we're working on right now, and it may or may not involve making a music video parody that may or may not air on youtube.  So that's something to look forward to.  In the meantime, though, I'm just going to go be sad and try to console myself by looking at my Beverly Cleary letter.  I bet she'd tweet us back if she had a Twitter account....And if she weren't 96 years old (Thanks, Wikipedia).