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 That Place — Off Assignment
A penchant for journeys and a fascination with strangers
What I Didn't Say — Off Assignment
“You see, Lagos always had a goal—to become a megacity, a world class city, a modern metropolis that Nigerians could feel proud to call home. But this dream comes at a cost.”
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
“8:45 p.m. at the Selinsgrove Speedway is a wall of sound rising up from the sprint cars racing around the half-mile track of clay and dirt."
Under the Influence - Off Assignment
I buy this CD from the Kmart on Santa Maria Way with a friend the summer before 6th grade. We walk to the store via a shortcut behind the thoroughfare without her parents as chaperones. My family lives across town, so we return to her house for the first listen. Summers are like this: my mother shuffles me to a friend’s house, and I start to equate car rides and leaving home with something fun. We didn’t always live out here—in the bad part of town, in a dirty house on a big lot full of rats.
Letter to a Stranger — Off Assignment
“You died 15 weeks after I was born. You and I, we breathed the same Nairobi air for 110 days. Hospital, home, clinic, maybe a church or two: These were the only places we saw together.
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?
Goodbye to Dirty Precious — Off Assignment
I’ve heard it said that the key to loving New York is learning to live with perpetual loss. The longer you stay in this inconstant city, the more rubble accumulates on the map etched into your psyche. There’s the six-person, one-bathroom apartment you first moved to when you were shit-broke and thought everything was exciting. There’s your ex’s apartment and there’s the not-quite-ex, the crush that never materialized into anything of substance, still taking up rent-free real estate in your brain.