Today after my food writing class I spoke with Lang Academic Fellow Marissa Gery about writing with a concern for an audience. We discussed what an audience might mean, how audiences form in our minds. About my own audience, I ended up telling Marissa that I often consider that the publications I write for have readers already in place (more or less), and that the people I think about as I’m writing are the other writers who share my concerns, which are many and varied. It turns out that a friend, Jeff Sharlet, one of these other writers, just published an essay about what he calls a “chummy clique of established writers” who shape his reading life and are, in effect, the audience he bears in mind while he writes. This is how I read his piece, anyway. Jeff has written stories that have been very important to me, including, most recently, some reflections on being in Paris last November. Yeah, we’re chummy. (If you’re interested in more on the relationship between writing and friendship, here’s a commencement speech I delivered last summer at Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program, on that very theme.)