The MacGuffin, a wonderful journal I have submitted to several times in the past with no luck, has just accepted 2 poems: The Truth of Pewter and Teeth of the Comb. I love the concept of a ‘macguffin,’ defined by the journal as: The moving force (and sometimes the solution) of a work of mystery fiction is referred to as a MacGuffin, a concept that originated in Victorian England.
Alfred Hitchcock used the term and said, “No film is complete without a MacGuffin because that’s what everybody is after.” The MacGuffin might be the papers everyone is looking for or the ring that was stolen — in short, the MacGuffin is any device or gimmick that gets a plot rolling. The MacGuffin itself has little, if any, fundamental importance, and, according to Hitchcock, is nothing in and of itself.
And so it is with my poems, I think. The Truth of Pewter is about a teapot my grandmother and her sisters brought from Sweden. It was a lucky charm for them in several ways and passed down to me has become something sort of magical as well. Teeth of the Comb is about homelessness and is told in the voice of a little girl living in a car with her mother and brother and the morning no one was there to fix her hair before school.
Thanks you to the editors of The MacGuffin! I am so excited to see my poems in print and to read the other work therein!