Off Assignment

http://www.offassignment.com/ Four years ago, we asked our favorite writers a question: Whats 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 youre 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 storyjust the kind of 900 words [the editors] had expected, hed later write. But the tale that haunted Pico was different. There was a strangera compelling Icelandic woman with whom hed 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 lef...