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Writing

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Comments are welcome. I’d love to hear any response you may have to something I’ve shared. Thanks!

  • The Girl in the Pink Dress
    by Karen MacKenzie

    As most of you know, I recently spent eight weeks serving as a juror on a murder trial. This poem is my attempt to honor the young woman who lost her life.

  • Wedding Poem
    by Karen MacKenzie

    On October 9th, 2022, my daughter Hannah married her long time partner, Charles. Here is a poem I wrote for them and read at their wedding.

  • School Clothes
    by Karen MacKenzie

    It’s the time of year for back-to-school shopping. Here’s a memory of a special shopping trip from the year I started middle school.

  • Photograph
    by Karen MacKenzie

    I’ve kept the photograph I talk about in this piece on top of my dresser for decades. Every morning I’ve stared at it, knowing there was something I wanted to say about it, or perhaps to it. I finally figured out what.

  • Physical Education
    by Karen MacKenzie

    In this prose poem, I look back at the way body image and sexual identity were handled fifty years ago.

  • Letters to My Father, Part IV
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Here is the final letter in the series.

  • Letters to My Father, Part III
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Here are the next two letters in the series.

  • Letters to My Father, Part II
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Here are the next few letters in the series.

  • Letters to My Father
    by Karen MacKenzie

    When my father died, my synagogue gave me a brochure to read called “Taking the Time You Need to Mourn Your Loss,” by Rabbi Anne Brenner. In it, Rabbi Brenner writes (quoting from her own book Mourning & Mitzvah): “Death does not end one’s relationship. Even after a death of one of the members, a relationship can still grow and change and issues can still be explored.”

    Despite years of trying to improve our relationship, my father and I still had many unresolved issues between us when he passed away. The idea of continuing to have a conversation with him about these issues, even after his death, and however one-sided, struck a chord with me, and I began to write letters to him. In my next few posts, I’ll be sharing some of these letters.

  • Forgiveness
    by Karen MacKenzie

    As I get older, and possibly wiser, I find myself more and more able to forgive both my parents and myself.

  • Understanding
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Having children of my own has helped me understand in a deeper way what I lost when my mother’s illness caused her to turn away from me. It has also helped me understand what she lost.

  • My Father in the Snow
    by Karen MacKenzie

    My relationship with my father was complicated. He wasn’t always critical and competitive. Today I’m sharing a prose poem which offers a more positive view of him.

  • Perfection
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Today I’m sharing two pieces about the way my father pushed me to be perfect as a child.

  • The Bargain
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Disclaimer: no babies were harmed in the making of this poem.

  • Troublesome Dolls and Books
    by Karen MacKenzie

    This week, I’m taking a break from painful memories of illness and sharing two light-weight pieces inspired by mothering young children: one about a doll I struggled with and one about a book I hated.

  • Scenes from an Illness, Part III
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Here is (perhaps) the last piece in this series.

  • Scenes from an Illness, Part II
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Here are two more pieces in the series. They focus on the extent to which I lost my way as a young woman because of everything I could not understand or accept about my mother’s illness.

  • Scenes from an Illness
    by Karen MacKenzie

    We still don’t understand why my mother was so sick for so many years. Was she suffering from mental illness? Was she suffering from unusually severe environmental allergies? Was she suffering from some complicated combination of the two? It’s hard to accept that we’ll probably never know.

    Today I’m posting the first few of a series of pieces I’ve been working on about some of my experiences with my mother’s illness.

  • Clan MacKenzie
    by Karen MacKenzie

    This piece is about the glue that holds a family together and what happens when that glue is lost.

  • The Wall
    by Karen MacKenzie

    This piece is about the way that pain inflicted on one generation can carry through to the next one.

  • Commencement
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Our daughter Rutie finally walks across the stage…

  • On the Verge
    by Karen MacKenzie

    My mother encourages me to step over the line between girlhood and womanhood…

  • Second in Command
    by Karen MacKenzie

    As the oldest of six children, I was my mother’s “second in command.” I folded laundry, dusted and vacuumed, changed diapers, helped with dinner, and washed dishes. And of course, I babysat. There was a kind of unspoken agreement between my mother and me – in exchange for my assistance, she gave me a relationship with her that was closer, more intimate, than what she gave my siblings. Perhaps we were too close.

  • After School
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Happy memories from when I was about ten years old.

  • Friday Nights
    by Karen MacKenzie

    When I was growing up, my parents went out on a date together every Friday night. During my younger years, we had a succession of teenaged babysitters from our church. But money was often tight, so as soon as my parents thought I was old enough, I became their babysitter, a position I held until I left home for college. In return, I received a small “raise” in my allowance. For my parents, “old enough” meant turning twelve. With five younger siblings, I’m not sure I was quite ready…

  • Monopoly
    by Karen MacKenzie

    My father loved to play board games and card games. He taught me to play bridge and cribbage while I was still in elementary school. But his favorite game was Monopoly. He was fiercely competitive and always played to win, no matter how young his opponent was.

  • What Sparks Joy
    by Karen MacKenzie

    A piece about the difficulty of letting go of the objects that carry our favorite memories…

  • The Egg Game
    by Karen MacKenzie

    A sweet memory of a game my son and I used to play.

  • Pandemic Hair
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Some thoughts on the long and short of my hair..

  • A Musical Legacy
    by Karen MacKenzie

    As I said in my previous post, my relationship with my father was full of conflict when it came to music. This week I’m sharing some reflections on that conflict.

  • Organ Practice
    by Karen MacKenzie

    This week I’m sharing a happy childhood memory of the many times I accompanied my father when he went down to our church to practice the organ. My dad and I had a conflicted relationship when it came to music, but those practices were a time when we seemed to be able to put our conflicts aside.

  • Ocean Storm
    by Karen MacKenzie

    This poem is a companion piece to Ocean, which I posted a few weeks ago.

  • A Trip to the Ocean
    by Karen MacKenzie

    This is one of those stories that my mother has told so many times that I feel like I remember it. But I was much too young when it happened to have any real memory of it. Instead, I imagine what I might have been feeling.

  • Fallen Oak Leaf
    by Karen MacKenzie

    This week, a poem.

  • Abortion Series
    by Karen MacKenzie

    No politics, just some reflections on the complexity of my experience.

  • Two Letters to My Writing
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Written 24 years apart, these pieces show the evolution of my relationship with my writing.

  • My “Crazy”
    by Karen MacKenzie

    My ex-trainer, Kim, used to say that everyone has their “crazy.” This piece is about (one of ?) mine.

  • Pandemic Hike
    by Karen MacKenzie

    In case you’re wondering whether I ever write about anything other than mothering experiences that happened years ago….

  • Mothering Young Children
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Today I’m sharing three pieces about the challenges of mothering very young children.

  • Welcome!
    by Karen MacKenzie

    Hello! Welcome to Karen and Benson’s blog. We look forward to sharing our creative endeavors with you. 

    Today I’m posting a set of short pieces about motherhood. I hope you enjoy them.

Photography

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  • Encounters of a Spiny Variety
    by Benson Margulies

    Years ago, Hannah gave me a cactus for a present. It lives on my desk, and traveled with me from Lexington, MA to Seattle. While my latest 4×5 camera is very light as 4×5 cameras go, it is still tempting to look for subjects that are right under my nose. I spotted the sun shining on the cactus. The result:

    The highlights are a bit blown out and I could wish for more light on the bit of driftwood. A week or so later, I received a macro lens for my large format camera. Hmm. How do you set up and use this? The first attempt:

    I was so busy fighting to get the cactus’ fuzz into focus, that I neglected to notice the bright bands at the upper right from the window in the background. I was also shooting diagonally down at the top of the plant, which led to some complicated use of the camera’s ‘motions’. Time for another session.

    Working at close range, it’s not hard to get enough light for some good contrast. And even a plain clay pot offers some interesting texture in black and white:

    Would this be a better image if I had the whole plant on the right hand side? Or do the spines leaving the frame give it some sense of movement? An organized person would have tried another making just that change … but instead I did some research on how to use a large format macro lens, and discovered the process of getting a 2:1 magnification factor:

    I’m not gonna lie. I like this one. The relatively familiar is rendered into something very different. I wanted to try some additional lighting. I got out a little LED lamp, figured out how to hold it, activate the shutter, and work a timer all at the same time …

    … and Henry the cat decided to land on the table in mid-exposure. Oh well, there’s always more film.

  • Karen Hears a Fit-Bit
    by Benson Margulies

    Karen is an extraordinarily intelligent person. Karen used to work as a technical writer, explaining abstruse mainframe computer operations to obtuse computer operators. (One wonderful day someone told her to document the process of ‘taking a dump.’ I can still hear her laughing.)

    Yet, each time that Karen encounters a new item of technology, you can set your watch, precisely, by the brief delay before she steps into a morass of terrible documentation and mediocre UX. Whatever it says on the box, ‘some assembly’ (by the family software weenie) is required.

    My first memory of this was Karen’s first desktop Mac. It was gray and it looked something like:

    I was naive. Knowing Apple’s great reputation for ease of use, I put the box down in her office space and invited her to open it up and follow the instructions. She would own the entire process from the start.

    She opened the box. And she found the ‘read me first’ document. And the other ‘read me first’ document. And the other ‘read me first’ document. Each inserted into the box by some slice of Apple that had something to sell, and none of them offering any useful instructions as to what to actually do with the unit.

    I sighed and proceeded to pull the pieces out of the box and put them together. I plugged in the keyboard and mouse and sent the power cord down behind the desk. I crawled under the desk, plugged in it …

    And cracked my head on the top of the desk when the machine sprung to life and loudly ejected the plastic shipping biscuit from the floppy disk drive.

    This pattern has never improved.

    This time around, Karen heard about the wonders of a fit-bit from our eldest, Hannah. She researched the options, picked one out, ordered it up, and waited (with much less anxiety than I would) for its arrival. In the fullness of time, she opened the box and read the instructions:

    “Install Our App on your Phone!”

    She did that. She launched the app. The app offered two buttons and only two buttons. ‘Setup’ and ‘Login’. The use of ‘Setup’ led to a demand for the use of ‘Login’. Do you see what is lacking from this picture? Yup: no sign of a register button. Karen heaved the canonical sigh of frustration and put it aside until she could catch me.

    — “What am I supposed to do?”

    — “Well, I suppose you should visit their web site and create an account.”

    — “Why don’t the instructions tell me to do that?”

    This is a question on par with: “Why does the porridge-bird lay its eggs in the air?” Less politely, why does every single company fail to do even the most basic user experience testing, particularly for the experience of the new user? Grump, Grump, Grump.

    After a bit more discussion along these lines, she heads off to the web site, and creates an account. In the last few months, we’ve switched her from using an account on our family Google domain to a plain-old-gmail account. (Why, You ask? Because my lovely employer has still not worked through the initial technical debt of building ‘Google Apps’, and many, many, things still don’t work if your account is in your own domain.)

    OK, so, the old account is much quicker to type than the new one. We still own it, and email to it forwards to her new account, so why not use it as an account identifier?

    Back went Karen to the phone to log into the FitBit app. Click login? It prefills with the account logged into the phone. Which is, of course, the new account. The UI makes it far from obvious that this is a prefill of a field you can edit, and heaven forfend that it should ask you which of the accounts on your phone you’d like to use. Back to the local tech support department.

    “Aha,” sez me. “I bet we can make this easier if we just login to fitbit.com with your Google account instead of having an account defined by an email and password.” Sure enough, fitbit.com allows the creation of an account with a ‘Login with Google’ button. We do that.

    Back to the phone. Does the phone app have a ‘Login with Google’ button to match? Nopes. On the phone, where typing is a pain in the fingertips, and a single click would be really valuable, it is nowhere in sight. You have to enter a password that you had to give the website even when creating a ‘Login with Google’ button. Note what company owns Fit-bit. Sigh.

    Finally, we have logged in on the phone. And like Alice in Wonderland, having acquired the key to the door, we find ourselves too big to get through it. Once we’ve logged in, there is no longer a ‘Setup a Device’ button in sight. Some searching reveals it buried in ‘My account’: The ‘Add a Device’ option, presumably intended for people planning to wear one fit-bit on each extremity.

    Now that we can finally set the thing up, the app finally mentions that it won’t set up until it’s been updated to the latest software. Oh, and it can’t possibly perform an update, even when connected to power, until the battery reaches 50% charge, and that may take an hour. “Can’t Make Me!”

    I. Can’t. Even. (As my other daughter might say.)

    Charge it up, you say? It comes with a charging adaptor with a 3″ cable with a USB-A connector on it. The very short cable presupposes that you’re going to plug it into a computer rather than a wall-wart; the magnet that holds the fitbit to the charger isn’t that strong, so leaving it dangling on a wall would not be reliable. In any case, there’s no wall-wart in the box. And her laptop, being fairly new, has zero USB-A connectors. Into my older laptop it goes for now.

    The year 2010 called and wants its USB-A connectors back. A quick visit to the fitbit support site yields a smarmy support person explaining that fitbit can’t see any reason to accommodate its users by offering a USB-C option, even for extra money. Don’t you love the smell of burning customer satisfaction in the morning?

    There’s no visual indication of the charge level; just a flat line reminiscent of a hospital tragedy. The app tells us to try again from time to time. We do. Each time we try and fail, it feels the need to deliver a notification, in spite of the fact that we are sitting right there staring at it.

    Finally, enough electrons find their way, the update succeeds, and the device comes to life. Sort of. Up pops a notification, “You need to make a bluetooth pairing for all the functionality to work.” Not in the app, mind you, in the Android notification system. I fire up the Android bluetooth settings, ask to pair a new device … and find only the neighbors’ two Samsung TVs. Apparently, it had already paired on its own.

    We’re not done yet. As Karen is working her way though the soi-disant documentation in the app, she finds an option related to notifications. It is completely ambiguous whether this concerns getting notifications from the fitbit on her phone, or notifications from her phone on the fitbit. Can you guess how enthusiastic Karen is about having a buzz on her wrist for IMs, emails, and ‘special offers from fitbit’? Not bloody much. Nonetheless, we travel down this path because we can’t tell from the Oracular pronouncement of the app which way these notifications will go. Only when we’ve dealt with a half-dozen security prompts does it become clear that we’re dealing with the wrong direction — and we have to go disable them all.

    Those of you with iPhones may be snickering with self-congratulation here. For all I know, fitbit is one of those companies that prioritizes the posh minority over the hoi polloi of green-dotted plebians. Trust me, however: when our flavor of family cell-phone was Apple, we had just as many of these comic incidents. Our switch to Android had nothing to do with my employment with Google. It happened years earlier, when Apple made a set of changes to the calendar UI so gratuitous that Karen was on the verge of drop-kicking her phone into orbit. Well, OK, Karen would never drop-kick a phone. She would, however, explain to me in very precise detail just how dissatisfied she was with Apple’s decision to move every wheel of her cheese just to satisfy some designer’s urge to … I don’t know. What urges do designers have, anyway?

    The fitbit is perhaps tamed. It’s Passover for another hour or two, so perhaps a taste of the bitter herbs of disappointment is seasonal. I can’t see any hope on this Easter Sunday that anyone is going to harrow this particular hell; I’m sure we’ll be visiting it again very soon.

  • Blue Time Loops
    by Benson Margulies

    My birthday came, as birthdays will, a few weeks ago. My children view birthday presents as a challenge: What can they give me that will produce many entertaining stories at the family Zoom? It’s even better if they can come up with a creative challenge to make me sweat. Listening to my son’s stories of his graduate committee, I feel like this present, ultimately, is a small dose of his experience in a photography MFA program. “What work am I making? Where is it going? What does it have to say?”

    “OK,” says the reader, “enough. — What Is It?”

    Cyanotypes. A relatively simple historical photographic process. Coat paper with some poisonous chemicals. Shine bright light through a negative onto the paper. A quick dip in a bit of hydrogen peroxide, and:

    What have we here? To begin with, someone had to spread a solution over a piece of paper evenly, with a minimum of brush strokes. Ignoring the evidence of poor manual dexterity for a moment, what is compelling about this image? It had better not be a pure moment of faux-hipster craft nostalgia. (I am not sure what is plus faux: the idea of me as a hipster, or the hipster trend of incompetent craft masquerading as authenticity (‘Those are artisanal burned spots …’)).

    Here is the world seen through a blue haze. Look closely, though, and the details are still there. Seeing is an active process: there’s no LED display in our head; our brains construct our visual experience from the signals of our retinas. ‘Reading’ this image might be pulling some of that unconscious process into our conscious experience. “Oh, look, reflections!” Let’s try another.

    A diesel locomotive is a large, solid, noisy, even bright object. Refract it through this process, and it floats in another space. Compare to:

    Expecting some comparison? Some rejection of the later in favor of the former? If you were thinking that I’ve completely caught the bug, and have constructed an entirely blueish esthetic model of my future photography …

    You’re probably not thinking that. Most of you know that I’m too distractible of a magpie to go there, or too far from any clear vision of why I’m making these images in the first instance. I am very fond of these near-infrared trains as well, and they are about as concrete and present as the cynaotype was abstracted and remote.

    So I’ll leave you with a conceptual view of my first day of cyanotypes, brushstrokes and all:

  • A Slough Walk with … Slough Film
    by Benson Margulies

    We went looking for that magic combination for a COVID-Seattle-Winter Weekend day. Not too far away. Not too crowded. Not too wet. Not too steep.

    Ebey Slough looked like a good risk. Less than an hour’s drive, flat as an estuary, and a small-scale, municipal park. And, Hey! We could add it to our collection of Seattle Area Sewage Treatment Facilities We Have Seen.

    In the fridge I had a roll of Cinestill-50D film, which I had never used. Film stock is a funny thing for us digital-film amphibians. As far as colors go, Photoshop should be able to replicate any look. (aside: Fuji, I’m told, puts countless hours into engineering their digital cameras to mimic various films.) But I’m not very patient with Photoshop. It feels too much like work. Trying out a new film, on the other hand, is like getting a new box of watercolors. The images I got from the Slough, in fact, have a decided resemblance to painting. I can’t say precisely why. I used my Fuji GWS 690 – a ‘modern’ film camera, so it’s not intrinsic soft focus. Maybe the cat drooled in my development tank, creating an unreproducible je-ne-sais-quoi?

    There are only eight 6×9 images on roll of 120 film, so at some point these pictures shift over to an old favorite: Kodak Ektar. This was about the point where we shifted from the clear blue sky of the afternoon to the low sun of the early Northern evening.

    It feels as if that was the last extended sunshine we’ve seen for weeks, so the images are comforting as I sit in the gloom typing.

  • Adventures in 4×5 and the Bathtub
    by Benson Margulies

    Why create images with Really Big film? (Leaving aside, for the moment, the people out there with even bigger cameras.) Each image is a fussy process of setting up the tripod, setting up the camera, getting everything level, and then working through a checklist out of an aircraft cockpit. All to try to avoid ending up with a blank sheet, a double exposure, or some other D’Oh moment.

    A classic justification is the virtue of having to think about each image. This is not a new idea. Recently, I saw a reprint of an article from the early days of roll film. I won’t try to bring a an accurate quotation back from memory. However, you may have read jeremiads lamenting digital photography’s encouragement of the creation of myriads of mediocre images. If so, you would find the sentiment of this article familiar. Only, instead of decrying 200 full frame digital images, or even 36 35mm images, it was a roll of, at most, eight images that set this author to foaming at the mouth.

    I have to admit that nothing is stopping me from stopping, and thinking carefully, digital camera in hand.

    Perhaps closer to my own motivation is the pleasure of working with my hands. The view camera is a mechanism big enough to see, disassemble, and understand. I tilt the front of the view camera, and I see the image get straighter. I spend all day long at work directing digital traffic, marshaling cohorts of tiny bits of silicon to do tricks. It feels comfortable to work on a smaller scale.

    My line of thought here leads to our guest bathtub. Which contains a bucket. Which contains a temperature control device. Can you see where this is going? I’m developing film. When you expose film, you create a latent image. No one can see it until you render it manifest. When I develop film, I work in the dark to bring something to light. I can’t see my hands while I wrestle film onto a holder and put it into the tank, and I can’t watch the chemical process that converts an extremely fragile latent image to a fairly robust negative. To take what I see, visibly, and turn it into what you can see, visibly, I have to wrestle with the invisible.

    “Really?,” you might be asking yourself. “He goes to all that trouble just to play word games?”

    I won’t deny that this appeals to me, but developing has some other advantages. It takes less time than shipping it off to a lab. The smells tickle old memories; I spent a lot of time in darkrooms in my teenage years. And once again, I’m engaged in a craft with tools that I can manipulate. Without writing a plan, circulating it to a dozen people, holding five meetings, and cajoling a team into implementing, I can accomplish something.

    This way lies madness; I could continue along to 19th-century technology where I prepared my own plates and had no dependence on a film factory. I could prepare them with ether. That’s bound to be popular with Karen.

    If feel the need to achieve that level of autonomy, I think I had better go learn to draw. Or get some fresh air.

    Anyway, here are a few recent results with the 4×5 camera.

    In contrast, here’s an image shot with a 6×9 folding film camera that fits in my pocket.

    While there is pleasure in working with simpler tools, sometimes the complicated tools let me make things that I’m not otherwise capable of.

    Note that I’d never claim that no one could get this image with film (not to mention oil paint), just that I don’t think that I could.