[media-credit name=’AJ MACLEAN/Herald photo’ align=’alignright’ width=’336′][/media-credit]The students were half the teacher’s age. And he stood close. So close.

But a small group of students in the University of Wisconsin Creative Writing Program did not mind a bit Friday as rock star Sting visited Helen C. White Hall to field questions about music and his autobiography, Broken Music.

In town for a concert at the Kohl Center Friday night, Sting, a former teacher, said he met with the students in the intimate conference room overlooking Lake Mendota in order to connect with citizens in a setting rarely afforded to international superstars.

“Speaking to students at these colleges which I’m playing — which I haven’t done for 25, 30 years — is, I suppose, a way of reconnecting,” Sting said. “The more famous you are [and] the more successful you are, the more isolated you are.”

Despite a musical career that has spanned 30 years — from early ’80s reggae-influenced punk band The Police through a long and successful stint as a solo artist — Sting devoted much of Broken Music, and his talk Friday, to his childhood in England.

Sting explained he chose to focus the book on his early days out of a desire to avoid writing an archetypal rock star biography. Other authors have written several such accounts, but none painted an accurate picture of his life, Sting said.

“I thought that [those authors] were trying to make me a much more colorful character than I am,” he said.

Born Gordon Sumner, Sting was never called Gordon as a child. Instead, friends called him “Lurch” and other nicknames until a trombone player dubbed him “Sting” at the age of 18.

“My kids call me Sting, my wife calls me Sting. It’s very cryptic. It’s very easy to sign your autograph,” he said.

Sting started playing music at a young age — and the love of music has not gone away, he said. But he did not choose the profession to earn money, he added.

“I thought [music] would be a very honorable profession to make a living,” Sting said. “I had no idea I would make $100 million a year playing music.”

Now, Sting rarely listens to music solely for recreation. Instead, he tries to dissect and analyze whatever he hears, even if it’s just elevator music.

Twice during the hour-long discussion, Sting read portions of Broken Music to the students. He described writing the book as the reverse of lyric writing: taking small ideas and expanding them into long text, as opposed to condensing big ideas into “rhyming couplets.”

With Broken Music, which was first released in 2003, selling well, Sting said he is signed up to write another book. But it won’t necessarily pick up where the first book left off, because his time in the music spotlight has left him with little perspective on the last 20 years of his life, he said.

Approximately 30 students and several professors from the Creative Writing Program were invited to attend the talk. Afterward, many said they were impressed by Sting’s willingness to speak about the book and the approach he took to writing it — and not just his musical career.

“It’s interesting because probably everyone in this room knows him and respects him as a musician,” UW senior Sonya Larson said. “Very few of us know him as a writer.”