My Mother Was a Witch

Afterword

When, in the late nineteen sixties, Ballantine Books decided to do a five-volume simultaneous publication of my work (four short-story collections and one new novel) my then agent, Henry Morrison, told me that the head of the firm was troubled by something and wanted to hear from me.

I telephoned Ian Ballantine, who pointed out that we might be facing some length problems in the collections. “Could you give me another group of your short stories,” he asked, “stories of different lengths so that, if needed, I could pop this one or that one into a given collection to make certain that they were all of pretty uniform length?”

I told him I could, and forwarded such a group to him in a few days. The stories in that group—all, in my eyes, second-rate pieces—were chosen on the basis of only one characteristic: widely varying lengths. Well, to my horror, Ian called me shortly after he received them and told me he liked the whole bunch very much and wanted to publish them as a fifth collection.

“But, Ian,” I wailed, “those are some of my worst stories!”

“Fine!” he replied. “Then how about calling the collection The Worst of William Tenn?”

I regret to this very day not having had the guts to go along with his suggestion. I came up with another title, and Ian liked it. But to take what I regarded as the curse off the book, I insisted on inserting a couple of other stories of which I was rather fond.

One of them was “My Mother Was a Witch.”

Before I am condemned for wandering outside the genre with criminal malice and utterly vicious premeditation, let me say this:

I admit freely that this story is definitely not science fiction; it is certainly not fantasy; and it is hardly even good red herring. But. It does demonstrate to the reader how much the simple fantastic was a part of my rearing and childhood.

How could I not have turned out as I have?

Written 1964 / Published 1966