Audience

Writers, unless they hide their work in a trunk, desire an audience. In my case, the audience never had to be large but I wanted it to be attentive. Fortunately -- and I say this because many "serious" writers don't receive this luxury -- I've had moments when my audience gets revealed to me. One of the more satisfying moments has been expressed this way (by G. Sirc):

"One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s." 

My ideas "seemed to catalyze my own discontent", he says ...he was "never able to forget" them ... this is an ideal audience, as far as I'm concerned.  And it happened twenty years after the essay was written! In other words, one never knows when the audience will reveal itself. But the work has to be available, even if only in "dimly-lit stacks" of a university library.

Yes, I really cherish this moment, as satisfying as writing gets with regard to having an audience. For me, much more special than "popularity" because it is very clear that Sirc "got" what I was writing.