I got there early and sat in one of the first few rows. As the auditorium filled, I spent the time talking to my friend, not paying attention to what was going on around me. But shortly before the reading began, once most of the audience had arrived, I noticed something odd about the members of the audience sitting in front of me and I looked around the room to confirm it: the vast majority of the audience was students.
Now, it might seem silly to find it odd that the majority of an audience for an event located on campus would consist of students–but when it comes to literary events in Ann Arbor, both on and off campus, this is very often not the case. In fact, just this Friday I went to a reading event located in East Quad whose audience was mostly middle age or beyond. Readings and book-signings generally attract the older crowd of Ann Arbor, even if that means taking a trip to campus.
But Justin Torres was different. For some reason, he attracted an unusual crowd. Now, I know his book, We the Animals, was required reading in at least one English class, but that wouldn’t explain the hundred or so students present. I was attempting to process this information when the reading began. Of course, hearing him speak made everything make more sense.
For starters, he is a very young and good-looking man–I say that not based on subjective preference, but from an objective standpoint, as he was named one of Salon’s Sexiest Men in 2011. But his youth extended beyond appearances. There were the things he said in between reading sections of his book–from the Beyonce reference to the statement about how despite taking off his jacket he was still “a professional human being”–which were things one would expect from the a college student, not a college professor. And there was something incredibly youthful about the way he spoke and the way he moved–there was this nervous energy within him and you could see that he wasn’t used to being up on that stage, behind the podium, staring out at us with us staring right back, as if he would prefer to switch places, to be the one sitting anonymous in a crowd of college students. This probably wasn’t his first event and since he is a professor, it certainly wasn’t the first time he stood up and spoke in front of a bunch of students, but this crowd, with its size and demeanor, was definitely not something he was used to.
I found the youthfulness of this event remarkable–it’s the first literary event I’ve been to that felt like it happened on a college campus, not in a community hub. And although I can appreciate getting out there and into the world (it is so very easy to forget that people not in the 18-25 age range do, in fact, exist), every once in a while, it’s nice to do something here that feels like it’s just us.
