Stevie Nicks, J.K. Rowling, and Twitter Threads

                Anybody who knows anything about me, knows that I am a huge fan of Stevie Nicks. I have a poster of her lyrics hanging in my dorm room, been to one of her concerts, and got the lyrics to one of her songs tattooed on my inner bicep. I have been listening to her music for as long as I can remember. My mom plays Stevie Nicks’ music all the time, so I grew up listening to it softly being played through our house’s speaker system. My mom sings to her cassette tapes as she drives and the music has helped connect my mother and me.

       As I got older, I started to read more about her life and came to know her as more than just a musician that sang beautiful songs. I admire her as writer, who turns her personal pain into poems set to music. She struggled through loss, addiction, and the pressures of fame. She is feminist icon who served as a pioneer for women in rock and roll and has influenced some of today’s musical artists. I am a fan of both the music and the person behind the microphone.

So when we were told in my Writing for Digital Media class to write a fan letter, I obviously chose to write to Stevie Nicks.

Here is what I wrote:

            

        Dear Queen of Rock and Roll,

        In one of my college writing classes, we were given an assignment to write a fan letter. I immediately thought, “This is easy. I am going to write to Stevie Nicks.” Then, when it came to writing this letter,I found myself struggling with what to say. How do you tell a person you’ve never met and doesn’t even know you exist how much they mean to you without sounding creepy or crazy? The only way I could think to do it was to start at the beginning.

        My mom is a huge fan of yours. I grew up listening to her 

sing along to your cassette tapes in the car. She played your vinyl records through our house’s speaker system. We danced to “Edge of Seventeen” and cried to “Landslide.” One summer, my mother, brother, and I took a road trip and we sung every song on “Rumours.”I lost track of how many times in a row we listened to the album.Your music has helped connect my mom and I since I was born. We both even agree “Silver Springs” is our favorite song of yours.

        When I went to college, I filled my dorm room with your music to feel more at home. Being away from home made me become a bigger fan of yours. At college, I found friends who were also fans of yours.In March of this year (2017), my friends and I went to your concert in Pittsburgh. Even though we sat in the nose bleeds, 

hearing you sing,tell stories and reveal your inspiration behind 

songs easily became one of the best times of my life. I was 

surrounded by people I love and dancing and singing to my favorite 

musician. It was a priceless moment.Thank you for that.Thank

you for your music and the stories you told at your concert.Thank 

you for helping to bring my loved ones together. I appreciate it 

greatly.

                        

         Love,

         Your lifelong fan

___________________________________________________________________

            

        It was a busy week this week in Writing for Digital Media, so on top of our Austin Kleon prompt we also completed a collaborative digital narrative. We were assigned a social media platform and instructed to find participants who would supply pieces to an overall cohesive narrative. For my collaborative narrative, I was given Twitter as my platform. I chose to allow my followers to create a story one tweet at a time. My goal was to gather twenty people for the story. I ended the project with 19 participants because I tried and failed to get J.K. Rowling to respond.

        In order to complete the project, I first tweeted an explanation of what was happening and invited my followers to participate. Then, I tweeted the beginning of the story and let them take over from there. I ran into a few problems throughout the project. Firstly, one of my friends tried to mess up the story and end it too quickly. However, my roommate went on a fixed the story with her tweet. Another problem I discovered was that some of my participants had a private twitter account, so other participants couldn’t see that contribution. I fixed this by screenshotting a private account’s tweet and attaching it to the thread myself. I also had to screenshot responses when my participants tweeted them out of order on the thread. At the end of 24 hours, I closed the thread by providing the end to the story. Attached here is the link to the full story.