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