Al Lewitt

Short Takes & Outtakes Al Lewitt

My father, Al Lewitt, took up short story writing in his eighties. The events he writes about were remembered from over the long course of his life. He'd always been a good writer, but what he wrote were business letters and letters to friends, and to Fil Lewitt, his son. He also taught English in high school for a few years after he retired from his life in the fine furniture manufacturing business. In full retirement, he had time to go back, Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility," yet memory, I think, is a fickle mistress: History as Fiction, Fiction as History. The son, me, has spent a lot of years since beginning to write for pleasure at the age of fourteen, and never stopping, to learn how to do it well, but any writer will tell you it's not a perfectible art, though one usually does improve. My stories come from a pastiche of reality, whole cloth, and from TS Eliot's "mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with warm rain." But for you, the reader, it's simply short fiction, however strange, in its many forms.