Book Review

Electric Grace: Still More Fiction by Washington Area Women
Edited by Richard Peabody
Paycock Press, 2007
www.gargoylemagazine.com/books/paycock/paycock.htm.
ISBN: 978-0-931181-25-2

Although some purists could possibly be upset that it took a man to introduce women writers of the district to the world, Richard Peabody is no ordinary man. He is just as well-known as the founder and co-editor of Gargoyle magazine and writing guru as he is a stay-at-home dad, a role that is the inspiration for many of his essays. In fact, it might even make sense that Peabody-who is married with two daughters-would possess the familiarity of and distance from the female perspective to produce a volume of enchanting, thrilling work by DC-area women.

At any rate, Peabody has pulled it off not once, but three times. Electric Grace: Still More Fiction by Washington Area Women is the third volume from Gargoyle imprint Paycock Press, following 2004's Grace and Gravity and 2006's Enhanced Gravity. It seems improbable that, in less than four years, 1206 pages of writing by 117 different women could be published and even more improbable that so much of it would be so good.

Yet, if the third volume is any indication of the first, I'd have to say Peabody exceeded beyond his wildest expectations. There is hardly a dud in the bunch; the reader can move from story to story without experiencing the unevenness in quality that anthologies tend to bring. Peabody is a respected editor, writer, and professor, and his care in selection, ranging from unknown to more established writers, is evident throughout. There are stories about family, many faintly veneered with numbing gloss of suburbia, such as Jody Lannen Brady's "Babies Don't Bowl" and others that scratch raw, open sores, like Cynthia Folcarelli's "Kitchen Talking." The difficult, often disappointing terrain of relationships is carefully examined in Michelle Brafman's "Her Antonia" and T. Greenwood's "Instruments of Torture." There is the painful rubbing caused by the generational gaps between immigrants and their children, so well-crafted in works such as Eugenia Sun-Hee Kim's "Year of the Boar, " one of the best in the volume. And then there are stories that wretch the bloated towels of prepubescence, excreting the beads of lost innocence, such as Randi Gray Kristensen's "The Lookout" and Maxine Clair's "Cherry Bomb."

The problem is that there are so many vibrant, electric stories to be mentioned here. Thankfully, this is not a live wire that will short soon; Peabody, in the Introduction, assures us he's already assembled enough material for a fourth addition. We should be thankful that Richard Peabody is doing a woman's work.—Jen Michalski.