We have a hunch: that the best travel stories haven’t been told. That the most compelling world journeys don’t make it into print. That the way a writer digresses from a plan or pitch is precisely what warrants telling. We’re launching Off Assignment—a website and reading series devoted to the gritty stories behind glossy travel magazines—to prove it.

Helmed by a collective of global writers, Off Assignment is a platform for original writing about rare places. We’re not here to guide vacations. We don’t cover spas or centennials. We care about voice and place and story. We want the writer back on the page—sweating, tripping, and telling a fuller tale.

Off Assignment is a call to writers to mine their richest material and shape the stories that have little place in mainstream travel media. We’re challenging international writers—not just travel journalists, but essayists with a sense of place, reporters with swollen notebooks, poets who wander, food writers with street cart taste—to go rogue. To write about what stuck and what haunts and what mattered most to their lives. We aim to shrink the gap between traveler and reader, and to make space for travel writing with stakes, surprise, and the power to endure.

Pico Iyer sat before a group of Yale students, telling the story behind his travel story.

They’d read the official version—a poignant sketch of Reykjavík in the ‘90s—but the legendary travel writer told them the truth: he'd left the most fascinating part out.

There was a woman—not a lover, but an Icelandic stranger who wandered the dim, wintry streets of Reykjavík with Pico, bewitched by this foreign writer so unlike everyone else in tiny, homogenous Iceland. For hours, they walked and talked. There was no hint of romance—she was engaged—but this stranger brought to Pico's journey an intensity he feels to this day.

Had he written this version? Everyone in the classroom wanted to know, hungry to read it. When Pico said no—the story was lucid in memory but not in print—he left a question in the air: how many writers are sitting on such stories? If there’s a hungry audience for them, why aren’t they featured? What’s lost in the glossy telling of our foreign journeys?

On a Manhattan rooftop, a group of traveling writers came together to raise these questions: Why not create a platform for the stories behind travel stories? Why not bring essayists into conversation with foreign correspondents? Why not put the focus on a sense of place? Why can’t the travel essay be playful, experimental, lyrical? Why, in a genre about crossing borders, should the writing be anything but bold?

They decided to call on the global writers they admired most, starting with Pico, and urge them to go Off Assignment.