Submission Date

7-24-2026

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

English

Faculty Mentor

Shane Kowalski

Comments

Presented during the 28th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 24, 2026 at Ursinus College.

Project Description

Monstrous houses. Bottomless pools. Talking carpets. It’s a scarecrow-eat-crow world, and we’re all living in it.

The Powder Room and other short stories is a collection featuring the presence of the supernatural in the otherwise mundane world. It moves through the sometimes frightening, sometimes sad, and often humorous lives of those who encounter the abnormal. Encompassing both stories drafted in past workshops and new material responding to the project’s development, my collection aims to explore and refine the undercurrent of the unsettling and unfamiliar in my work, and to offer a statement on the direction of my future writing.

I have developed the stories in the collection with attention to genre and form, reading from James Wood’s How Fiction Works and Benjamin Percy’s Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction. Additionally, I have aimed to expand my understanding of storytelling through a reading of the canonized and contemporary authors of short fiction, the supernatural, and the experimental.

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