Off Assignment

http://www.offassignment.com/ Four years ago, we asked our favorite writers a question: What's your best untold story? Anyone who has ever shared a drink with a journalist knows the truth: the most surprising, funny and life-changing part of the trip rarely makes it into the narrow confines of an article. As New York Times editor Damien Cave put it: “When you turn in a story, you feel like you’re only squeezing a third of the lemon.” Off Assignment wants to give you those last two-thirds. In the summer of 1987, Pico Iyer traveled to Iceland on a reporting trip for TIME. Once home, he filed a story—“just the kind of 900 words [the editors] had expected,” he’d later write. But the tale that haunted Pico was different. There was a stranger—a compelling Icelandic woman with whom he'd wandered Reykjavik. Pico never wrote the tale of this woman; rather, he told it on a whim in the spring of 2013 to a writing class at Yale taught by Off Assignment co-founder Colleen Kinder. When he did, he left a question in the air: how many writers are simply sitting on their best stories? Scores of A-list creatives have since gone "off assignment": Gay Talese, Sloane Crosley, Phillip Lopate, Jack Hitt, Gideon Lewis-Krauss, Suketu Mehta, Ted Conover, Leslie Jamison, Marcia DeSanctis, Rolf Potts, Mary Morris, Jon Lee Anderson, Sara Wheeler, Anna Ziegler, Lauren Groff, David Farley, and Pico Iyer—who put his Reykjavik tale to the page for our first print issue.