Off Assignment
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Off Assignment is a non-profit literary magazine with a penchant for journeys and a fascination with strangers. Born out of a desire to tell “the story behind the story," we’ve evolved from a journalists’ after-hour parlor to a home for literary essays about journeys, broadly defined.
OA began when co-founder Colleen Kinder invited legendary journalist Pico Iyer to her Yale writing class. She expected Pico to analyze the essay she’d assigned to her students: a classic portrait of Reykjavik he had authored two decades earlier. But he digressed into a tale he had never put to the page, about a magnetic local with whom he’d wandered Iceland’s unfading summer streets. This stranger dominated Pico’s memories of his reporting trip. Struck by this, Colleen asked fellow writers: Have you ever had a story you wanted to write, behind an assignment? They answered: Always. Source
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| Scope | National |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Country | N/A |
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Recent Articles
Search ArticlesGoodbye to the Ethiopia I Invented
I. Departure In August 2017, I went searching for my grandfather’s home. He had come to what was to later be called Kenya as a teenager in 1917, escaping the slavery and serfdom of southwestern Ethiopia. And now, a century later, I was making the same journey in reverse, seeking to fill holes in the inherited family lore and the narrative of my identity. All I knew about him was who he had been in Marsabit, the town in Kenya which he had moved to, and where I had grown up. This was a recent heritage.
Goodbye to That Place — Off Assignment
All Columns Letter to a Stranger No Equivalent What I Didn’t Say Under the Influence Witching Hour Goodbye to That Place
What I Didn't Say — Off Assignment
“I come with a background where I'm not a shocked or as naive about why the president is doing any of this and the impact that it has and how it resonates with his base, and why he presses on the caravan issue for example. It just doesn't surprise me that he's using what's happening at the border for his own political advantage. It works because we've seen it work time and time again in Arizona.”
No Equivalent - Off Assignment
All Columns Letter to a Stranger No Equivalent What I Didn’t Say Under the Influence Witching Hour Goodbye to That Place
Witching Hour - Off Assignment
All Columns Letter to a Stranger No Equivalent What I Didn’t Say Under the Influence Witching Hour Goodbye to That Place
Under the Influence - Off Assignment
“The historian is like Merlin, living backwards from the future, knowing what the world is, but having to infer why. As we peer into the past, the view grows less distinct, until it vanishes in a fog.”
Letter to a Stranger — Off Assignment
“I was listening to “Church” by Coldplay, carrying the painting under my arm, that foggy Tuesday dawn at Cairo International Airport. Over the years, I’ve gained certain travel habits. One of them is traveling at dawn. The habit began to take shape in 2003, just days before the American invasion of Iraq, when my family and I traveled to a village on the Iraqi-Iranian border.”
Darde Ghorbat - Off Assignment
Farsi is a language of tenderness. It is an infusion of poetry and humor, the intersection of everything human. “Jigareto Bokhoram”—which translates to “let me eat your liver”—is an expression of endearment. A person who is “bi Namak” is “without salt”: dull, the antithesis of charming. You could say “I love you,” or you could say, “I am willing to sacrifice myself for you” (“fadat besham”). There is an inherent desperation in how we express our love and utter our devotion.
To the Old Man in the Cowboy Costume — Off Assignment
You wait there in the alpine light, beneath the fluorescent glow of the Thai restaurant. Your hair is cropped and peppered with gray, grown out from a few months post-shave, I suspect. You’ve lost some weight, lean again the way you were when I was young, but you still stand tall for someone from our country. A simple clean shirt, denim jeans, and brown boots—leather, like those you’d see on a cowboy. You don’t notice me at first. There’s a frown etched into your face. Sadness? Confusion? Sorrow?
How to Write About Desire — Off Assignment
Mondays: November 3 - December 1 7 - 9 p.m. EST Please register with the email to which you’d like to receive class correspondence and readings. How do we turn internal obsession into a narrative that resonates broadly? What's the role of restraint when writing with passion? Storytelling is neither a mystical pursuit, nor a technical one. It boils down to desire. The reader is asking two essential questions when they pick up a story. First: Who do I care about? And second: What do they care about?