To celebrate the release of Electric Grace: Still more Fiction by Washington Area Women tonight, editor Richard Peabody and ten of the book’s forty-two contributors will be reading selections from their work at Politics & Prose tonight at 7 p.m. Faye Moskowitz, a memoirist, poet, short story writer and professor, will read from her story “Completo (A Triptych),” from the journal, Story Quarterly.

Professor Moskowitz—or just Faye, as she would have it—grew up in Detroit but has lived in D.C. for 45 years and has written mostly on her life as a Jewish American woman and mother. Her work can be found in dozens of anthologies as well as the Washington Post, The New York Times, and Jerusalem Post. Her books include A Leak in the Heart, Peace in the House: Tales from a Yiddish Kitchen, and Whoever Finds This: I Love You. She is currently writing poetry and teaching classes on Creative Writing and Jewish American Literature at The George Washington University.

Moskowitz found time to answer some of DCist’s questions in her GWU office.

You’ve been active in the Washington women writers’ community for some time. Was Electric Grace a product of this community or did Peabody work on this separately?

I’m not sure how Peabody went about getting this all together, but I really wasn’t involved. I got a call and they said asked me if I had anything I could contribute to this anthology and I said sure, but the publisher of the story we wanted was asking for too much money for reprint rights, so we settled on this one. Around four or five weeks ago, I e-mailed a copy editor, had a little argument about the use of one particular word, a neologism, but that was that.

Does D.C. factor into all your stories?

I write about D.C. some. But a lot about Michigan. Most of my stories are about growing up in Detroit. But we’ve been here since 1962, in the same house in Cleveland Park. My husband, a lawyer, worked for Senator Philip Hart and when we moved in it was all democratic. All newspaper people. The national editor of the Post lived in the neighborhood. It was a literary and political street. When the republicans came into D.C. it all changed, now there’s a whole new generation, with babies, and we’re the oldest on the block.

What about being a woman? Do you feel that is as big a part of your writing as being a second generation Jewish American?

It’s like breathing. It factors into everything, and it’s very hard to separate that out. The being Jewish thing is in everything too, of course. That’s why I got Bat-Mitzvahed three years ago. I studied two years with my daughter and we learned Hebrew and everything.

You’ve written in many genres, but no novels. Would you ever consider writing one?

I don’t have the attention span to write a novel and I love the short story. It’s got the compactness of poetry but with more space to breathe and develop. I really think the short story is the most beautiful form of writing there is.

Photo courtesy of the Paycock Press website.