Excursions: The Postgraduate Journal for Interdisciplinary Research

invites submissions around the theme of ‘Virus’.

Virus: – a submicroscopic infective particle typically consisting of nucleic acid coated in protein, which is able to multiply with the cells of a host
organism

… Read full post »

*Flickr image by **lk*

Shine

I followed a lover to California because Ohio was cold and because he had eyes that glowed in the dark.  We crossed the country in separate cars, my lover and I, he always leading and I… Read full post »

Black Friday

When Theresa pulled into the retail park at midnight, she’d been alone except for two errant shopping carts.  Just as she had done for 19 years, Theresa sat there all night, waiting for the sales. She loved the Thanksgiving holiday, but -- so much work. After/… Read full post »

Writers - and there are so many of you talented people here on Open Salon - here's a chance to use your work for good.  Submit a max 500-word story to 50 Stories for Pakistan, from which the proceeds will be donated to the Red Cross effort to aid those affected… Read full post »

Because historically – and contemporarily – so much “ickiness,” embarrassment, shame and mystery have surrounded women’s monthly periods, Elissa Stein and Susan Kim have written a book with an admirable purpose.  Flow:  The Cultural History of Menstruat… Read full post »

On a layover in Dublin a couple of days ago, I picked up the following book in an airport bookshop:

McMafia was published by Vintage, an imprint of Random House, in 2009.  Billed as the Fast Food Nation of organized crime, the book sounded interesting. What struck… Read full post »

Hello, everyone.  I have been away for several months, mostly because I had to force myself to stop losing so much time just surfing endlessly through posts and reading everyone's work here on Open Salon. I had to do the same with Huffington Post and big Salon:  enforced a moratorium for… Read full post »

Back before the club closed its doors forevermore, I sat on the bleacher-like steps of the Opium Garden in South Beach, Miami, and watched a breakdancer in a strategically torn t-shirt. Her athletic body gyrated; she pop-locked, downrocked and piked and then she sat down next to me, another girl in… Read full post »

Okay, I can't help myself.  I bullied my lovely fiance into being my dress-up doll and letting me take lots of pictures of him so that I could enter him into Esquire's Best Dressed Real Man contest.  He complied and put on a three-piece suit in the SoCal heat. … Read full post »

Barbara Cartland

(for Mark ...)

“The postmodern reply to the modern consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently. I think of the postmodern attitude as tha… Read full post »

Representatives from The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) will be in Washington in a couple of days for Literacy Education Advocacy Day tomorrow, April 23.  While there, they will be lobbying legislators to designate a National Day on Writing.  The proposed date for the first… Read full post »

Dear Mark,

I was redheaded and Vanned
and needed to take a seat before I was ready to dance.  
You were pink-topped and brown-capped
and smiling like your face could clap its hands.

This is what else I remember from that covered garden:
A pastel shirt on a pasty tan Frenchman and
nothing else. … Read full post »

Teak-framed, flanked by heavy scrolls, the mirror leans back at an angle, reflecting ever only headless torsos, unclaimed legs.  Katie, sturdy as a brass padlock from years of diving after soccer balls, examines her faceless self, hands gliding across the belly, sliding along the inside… Read full post »

Koh Tao, island lazing in the Gulf of Thailand, was untouched by the developers’ trucks until the beginning of the Nineties.  Today, Koh Tao is yoga pillows on teak decks, boundarylessness, green papaya salad, open air salas, cushions on sun-warmed sand.  It is bamboo… Read full post »