Stacy Mattingly (Fiction ’11) published a moving essay about a bit of family history in Off Assignment. The essay, called “To the Spy I’m Named For,” is part of the excellent “Letter to a Stranger” column. Read it here!
Off Assignment had this to say about the piece:
R was a spy, a diplomat from Mississippi, a CIA man in South America. What is the legacy of his name, of his shrouded past? Writing about her namesake, author @stacemattingly lifts the veil on the mysterious generational impulses that guide our paths, taking us from the American South to Sarajevo to snowy Boston to tell us a family story that delicately navigates the line between the memorable and the unknowable.
Stacy also contributed a “Behind the Essay” interview, which you can find here or linked in her bio below the essay.
Congratulations, Stacy!
Stacy Mattingly is a writer living in Boston. She launched the Sarajevo Writers’ Workshop in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2012 and later helped lead the first Narrative Witness exchange (Caracas-Sarajevo) for the International Writing Program. She has recently completed a first novel set in the present-day Balkans.
