Furious Friendship

Furious Friendship Gregg Shapiro (bio) I have Denise Duhamel to thank for introducing me to Maureen Seaton. Denise and I were undergrads in the Creative Writing department at Emerson College in Boston in the 1980s. Poets. I had the honor of being the first person to publish a poem by Denise when I was a poetry co-editor at The Emerson Review. After living in Washington, DC, and Boston throughout the 1980s, I moved back to Chicago (where I was born) in 1989. I wasn't happy about returning there, and in phone calls and letters, I often complained to Denise about my displeasure with the city. But in 1991, I was fortunate to meet someone who made life more bearable, and with whom I could share our mutual distaste for Chicago. If my journals are to be trusted, I met Maureen on Monday, July 15, 1991. Denise and Maureen had become friends while Denise was finishing her MFA at Sarah Lawrence in 1987, before Maureen earned hers from Vermont College. When Denise found out that Maureen was moving from New York to Chicago to work for her father, she called me and offered to introduce Maureen to me, the only person she knew in that city at the time. Maureen came to my studio apartment at the northeastern edge of Chicago's Uptown neighborhood. We hit it off right away, sharing stories about our mutual affection for Denise and for poetry. We then walked over to Benny's Grill on Argyle Street, the closest thing we had to an old-fashioned diner/greasy spoon. After lunch, we walked east to Foster Beach and watched the waves of Lake Michigan rushing to the shore. At the end of the week, I was leaving for a four-week residency at Blue Mountain Center, an artist and writers' colony in the Adirondacks, but we promised to pick up where we left off when I returned. And we more than kept that promise. Less than a month after I got back to Chicago, I had the pleasure of attending my first reading by Maureen Seaton at Women a source of inspiration (and irritation) that we incorporated into our stanzas. If little else, Chicago did provide us with a bounty of literary things to do. We attended Carol Anshaw's Aquamarine book party at Unabridged Books in the winter of 1992. Maureen and I did End Page 189 our first poetry reading together a few weeks later at People Like Us Books, and then again at PLU in November. Once, we did a reading at a newly opened Barnes & Noble in Evanston. The bookstore set us up with a podium and a microphone. There were rows of chairs, and every seat was filled. We thought it was strange that the reading was taking place near the children's section, especially since some of the poems in our respective books might not be considered "family friendly." At one point during the reading, one of the staff members came running over to apologize and turned off our mics. They let us know that the reading, which was being broadcast throughout the store, had resulted in polite complaints. When I took Amtrak to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to stand up at our mutual friend's wedding in Lewisburg, Maureen picked me up at the station and we drove together to the hotel. After the wedding in Lewisburg, we drove back to Chicago together, stopping in Youngstown...