BIRMINGHAM, Ala. (WIAT) -- Susan Orlean used to joke that if The New Yorker wasn't around, she would be unemployable.

Well, maybe it's not so much a joke as a comment on the free reign the magazine has given her to write about whatever she wants, from orchid poachers in Florida to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois and a beauty pageant at a Holiday Inn in Prattville, Alabama.

"There aren’t that many publications that are open to pursing ideas that are a little off the beaten track, a little unnewsworthy," Orlean said. "I’m very lucky to find my place that lets me do that."

Orlean is one of many writers whose work has graced pages of the magazine, which celebrated its 100th anniversary Friday. The New Yorker, which began in 1925 as a way to chronicle life in New York City from the corner of art and culture, eventually turned its gaze beyond Manhattan to the rest of the world. Throughout the last century, Alabama has served as good copy for the magazine.

For example, there was Elizabeth Flock's story on Brittany Smith, a woman convicted of murder after killing the man who allegedly raped her in 2018 while trying to protect herself, using the state's Stand Your Ground law as a defense. There was also staff writer Charles Bethea's 2017 exclusive about how former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore, then in the middle of sexual misconduct allegations that ultimately derailed his Senate ambitions, was allegedly banned from the Gadsden Mall in 1970s due to his "interactions with teenage girls." Moore has denied the report.

Even Roz Chast, a cartoonist whose work has been published over 1,000 times in the magazine since 1978, used Scottsboro's Unclaimed Baggage store as inspiration for one cartoon, “Come Take a Journey to the Planet of Lost Luggage,” which was published in her 2006 collection, "Theories of Everything: Selected, Collected, Health-inspected Cartoons."

Alabama also marked a turning point for several writers at the magazine, such as Renata Adler, who came to the state in 1963 to write about the Selma-to-Montgomery march, embedding herself with protesters as they walked 54 miles between Selma and Montgomery over voting rights.

"It totally changed my life," Adler said. "I became a different person and the work I wanted to do became completely different."

To both celebrate The New Yorker's 100th anniversary and explore the magazine's relationship with the state over the years, several writers from The New Yorker discussed some favorite pieces of theirs covering Alabama.

Renata Adler

Renata Adler had been at The New Yorker for a couple of years when she felt it was time for a change. At the time, her main job was writing and editing book reviews and essays for the magazine, but she wanted to try something else.

"I just wanted to be a reporter," Adler said. "It was just so interesting and exciting."

Seeing the growing civil rights movement in Alabama, she saw an opportunity to do a different kind of writing, so she went William Shawn, the longtime founding editor of the magazine, to ask him a favor.

"I asked Mr. Shawn if I could go down to Selma to cover what was happening down there," she said. "He said 'Sure."

Writing about the Selma-to-Montgomery march, Adler adapted the writing style of a war correspondent, marching alongside protesters and observing everything that was happening along the way, from beginning to end.

"It was unclear what such a demonstration could hope to achieve," Adler wrote in her piece, "The March for Non-Violence from Selma," which ran in the magazine as "Letter from Selma" on April 10, 1965. "Few segregationists could be converted by it, the national commitment to civil rights would hardly be increased by it, there were certainly an element of danger in it, and for the local citizenry it might have a long and ugly aftermath. The marchers, who had five days and four nights in which to talk, tended for the most part to avoid discussions of principle, apparently in the hope that their good will, their sense of solidarity, and the sheer pageantry of the occasion would resolve matters at some symbolic level and yield a clear statement of practical purpose before the march came to an end."

However, this particular hook of taking part in the march to cover the movement only happened because of, as Adler puts it, a "wonderful mistake." Riding into Selma, she had a hard time finding any hotel that would rent a room to her, so she had to change up her plans.

"I looked like an agitator," she said, specifically remembering the stockings and high heels she wore and marched in during her trip.

Admittedly uncomfortable with interviewing subjects, Adler found she was able to cover the march best by keeping quiet and letting other people's words and actions tell the story.

"The only thing I’ve been able to do best is hang around," she said.

Despite heated race relations in Alabama and the hostile situations the protesters founds themselves, Adler never felt scared for her safety.

"I didn’t feel any danger ever," she said. "It’s strange to me: the few wars I’ve been to, I never had the sense of danger. I get stage fright. There are all kinds of things I'm scared of. I don’t like horror movies, but somehow, I don’t have a sense of war. I guess you only get it if you’re in the middle of it."

Adler said having her first serious reporting assignment in Alabama was what opened up different possibilities for what her creative life could be. With the exception of a one-year stint as film critic for The New York Times, Adler wrote for The New Yorker for nearly 30 years, in addition to publish two novels and several collections of her writing covering politics and culture.

Adler, who is now writing a memoir, said more than just being able to cover a good story, she was inspired by being around protesters in Alabama who were fighting for what was right. In the end, the experience put her life on a different path.

"I would probably still be doing book reviews if it wasn't for Alabama," she said.

Calvin Trillin

From 1967 to 1983, Calvin Trillin would travel to some part of the country to cover a story once every three weeks for a series he penned for the magazine called "U.S. Journal."

Trillin, who started at the magazine in 1963 and continues to contribute writing to it today, would often try to find stories that weren't necessarily being covered by the national press. Sometimes they were about ordinary people, sometimes they were about things happening in places that many had never heard of.

"I sort of had the country to myself," Trillin said.

Before arriving at The New Yorker, Trillin had worked in the Atlanta bureau of Time magazine, where he covered the Freedom Riders and other moments in the civil rights movement. In fact, it was Trillin's work covering the South that, through a series of fortunate breaks, brought him to the magazine, his first published piece being "An Education in Georgia" about the desegregation of the University of Georgia.

"Mr. Shawn must have been increasingly interested in getting somebody to write about the South and race, which was the same subject then," he said in a segment of the documentary "Top Hat and Tales: Harold Ross and the Making of the New Yorker."

Throughout his career, Trillin filed many different pieces from Alabama, from a former KKK member whose business was being boycotted in 1970 for his refusal to fire two Black employees, to the Bayou La Batre community dealing with the arrival of "Moonies" in town from the Unification Church in 1978. However, it was his piece on a group of quilters from Gee's Bend, Alabama that he remembers more fondly.

"As I remember, there were sort of sophisticated white people who had just discovered the quilting bee" he said of the group, whose quilts have been featured in galleries around the world. "Having two sorts of people rubbing up against one another always makes for a good story."

In the piece, which ran as "The Black Womens of Wilcox County" in 1969, Trillin set the scene of how the quilting group, which had worked and lived in relative obscurity in a remote part of the state for generations, was finally getting attention for the quilts. Today, these same quilts have been featured in galleries around the world and are considered a quintessential Americana artform.

"The Freedom Quilting Bee, which did twenty-two thousand dollars' worth of business last year, already has twenty thousand dollars' worth of orders this year. Its problem is not whether it can sell what it produces but whether it can possibly produce enough to fill the orders it has sold," Trillin wrote.

Trillin's piece on Gee's Bend reflected a theme he carried over in many of his pieces over the years, from writing about food to covering a film critic who only reviewed movies at drive-in theaters. What did they all have in common? To Trillin, they were good stories.

"I didn’t want to do it as a way to talk about the human condition; I just wanted to tell a story because it was a good story," he said.

Susan Orlean

Susan Orlean has always enjoyed traveling through worlds she wasn't necessarily familiar with. It's a trait she brought with her when she was hired at The New Yorker in 1992.

So for her, the South was ripe material for exploring places and traditions she wasn't entirely familiar with.

"To me, it’s a part of the world that is so rich in tradition and history, but has such a complicated deep history of its own," Orlean said. "It always speaks to me."

Following the murder of child beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey, the offbeat world of beauty pageants took center stage in the national media. Orlean saw it as another way to explore a subculture beyond just the headlines, so she decided to travel to Prattville to cover the Universal/Southern Charm International Beauty Pageant being held at a Holiday Inn in town.

Spending time backstage with parents and children alike and hearing their stories, Orlean was touched by how these pageants meant a lot more for people living on the margins.

"It may be embarrassing or naive to believe that being Miss America will lead you somewhere in life, unless it happens to be your life, or your daughter's life, and the working-class that has been assigned to you and your baby feels small and flat and plain," Orlean wrote in her piece, "Beautiful Girls," which ran in the magazine On August 4, 1997. "There are only so many ways to get out of a place like Prattville. The crown you win on Sunday might be the chance for your beautiful baby to get a start on a different life, so that someday she might get ahead and get away."

Orlean said it was important to her to treat the beauty pageant piece, as well as most of the writing she had done throughout her career, as a way of meeting a subject on its own terms.

"By nature, I’m not judgmental," she said." As a writer, it’s my job to see these new worlds and not see them from this alien perspective, but celebrate what about it means something to me."

Alabama also played a part in another piece Orlean wrote about a traveling gospel group, the Jackson Southernaires, which she followed through the circuit in different towns in the South, including Demopolis, Alabama. It was an experience not only captured in her 1995 New Yorker piece, "Devotion Road," but also figures into her upcoming memoir, "Joyride," which will be out Oct. 14.

"It was such an adventure and also, it wasn’t only the South, it was this subculture of the Black gospel world, which is a subculture of a subculture" she said. "It just embodied everything I feel, that I'm a very lucky person with a job that allows me some very incredible experiences."

Orlean believes what makes places like Alabama and the Deep South so compelling to write about is how the region has been able to maintain a distinct identity in a changing America.

"One of the reasons that stories in the South appeal to me is we have an homogenization of culture that has unfortunately happened in many places here and that hasn't impacted the South as much," she said. "It’s something I’m very wistful about because I love that sense of regional identity and I feel like we are losing that in parts of the country."

Reeves Wiedeman

Like many stories that end up making it to print, Reeves Wiedeman's profile of sports radio host Paul Finebaum came because of another project fell through. Or, more specifically, suffered a devastating injury.

Wiedeman, who worked at The New Yorker from 2009 to 2015, had been working on a profile of Ricky Rubio, a point guard who was then playing for the Minnesota Timberwolves. Interested in his flashy persona, Wiedeman was in the middle of working on the piece when, during a game against the Los Angeles Lakers in March 2012, Rubio tore his ACL while guarding Kobe Bryant, taking him off the court for the rest of the season.

"The New Yorker wasn’t going to publish a story about a player who wasn’t playing, so that killed my story," Wiedeman said.

Looking for something else to work on, Wiedeman looked to what was happening in Alabama. Originally from Kansas City, he understood how rabid a team's fanbase could be and, given the recent arrest of Crimson Tide fan Harvey Updyke for poisoning Toomers Oaks in Auburn and the continued success of Alabama's football team under Nick Saban, Paul Finebaum seemed to be a good way to explore all those ideas.

"What was most interesting about Alabama to me was how much the culture of a big part of the country is embedded with this sport and if you wanted to talk about that, you did it with Finebaum," Wiedeman said.

Reporting the story, Wiedeman visited with Finebaum several times, sitting in on his radio show as well as going to football games with him. In addition to exploring the fascination with Alabama football, Wiedeman was interested in how the cultural watering hole where many fans went to talk about the game was a radio show led by an unlikely ringleader in Finebaum, a newspaper man-turned radio personality.

"Finebaum is, by his own admission, an unlikely candidate for the voice of the South. He is fifty-seven, Jewish, and bald—his callers compare him to Hunter S. Thompson, or Mr. Burns, from 'The Simpsons'—and had he played football, which he did not, he would have needed to add weight to make the roster as a punter," Wiedeman wrote in his profile, "King of the South," that ran on December 10, 2012. "He prefers MSNBC to ESPN, and expresses surprise that he has not ended up in a more academic profession: during one show, I heard him make a reference to Sartre’s 'No Exit' to explain his trouble ending an irritating interview. 'I have a very difficult time listening to sports radio,' Finebaum told me one day, while driving in Birmingham. He was listening to 'Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This),' by the Eurythmics. Another time, it was Tracy Chapman."

Wiedeman said working on the Finebaum profile was a way of trying to reveal to a New Yorker audience a part of the country and a regional obsession that is unlike anywhere else.

"It’s a chance to get to understand a different part of the country," he said.

The Finebaum piece was a big moment in Wiedeman's career. It was the first feature he had gotten published in the magazine and led to other plump assignments, from covering Alabama football's subsequent success stories to essays on Manti T'eo and tennis player Roger Federer. Today, Wiedeman is a staff writer at New York magazine, where he recently wrote about Saturday Night Live's future in the leadup to its 50th anniversary celebration.

Wiedeman said he is grateful for his time at The New Yorker and what the magazine continues to contribute to the cultural conversation in America.

"Most of the readers of The New Yorker, when we wrote about Finebaum, they had no idea who he was, but we made it a point to care about these things and show it was a worthy subject to explore," he said. "I think it shows that people want to be surprised, they want to explore the world and learn about new things and I hope it continues."

Alexis Okeowo

Throughout their career, Alexis Okeowo has traveled around the world, covering everything from bombings in Somalia, the gas crisis in Mexico to a cult leader in Kenya charged with the deaths of 191 of his followers. Since 2015, they have been a staff writer at The New Yorker.

However, one of the most shocking things Okeowo learned came from their own home state of Alabama, where much of the area continues to lack proper access to safe sewage systems.

"In Alabama, not having a functioning septic system is a criminal misdemeanor. Residents can be fined as much as five hundred dollars per citation, evicted, and even arrested. Rush’s sister Viola was once arrested for a sewage violation. But installing a new system can cost as much as twenty thousand dollars, which is more than the average person in Lowndes County makes in a year," Okeowo wrote in their piece, "The Heavy Toll of the Black Belt's Wastewater Crisis," in 2020.

The piece remains one of Okeowo's favorites about Alabama.

"These are conditions that you see in developing countries abroad," Okeowo said. "That’s one of those moments where you‘re like, 'This is the 21st century in America.'"

Nonetheless, Okeowo reported the piece not as one of exposing statewide negligence, but of those fighting to make it better.

"It’s about people fighting for their community," they said. "It’s a story of Alabama and people, despite hard circumstances, trying to look out for their community."

The piece on the state's wastewater issue is one example of how Okeowo, who grew up in Montgomery, tried to use their personal knowledge of Alabama to put a different lens on the state for a national audience.

"So many people assumed I didn’t like growing up in Alabama or that I had a terrible education," they said. "Parts of me were like 'That’s not true,' so I decided I really needed to make sure to write about Alabama from the experience of what it was like to be there... show that this place is not that different from the rest of the country. It’s just like everywhere else: it has its own story."

Okeowo would go on to write several pieces about Alabama, from the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and the role of conservatism across the state. In fact, Okeowo's forthcoming memoir, "Blessings and Disasters: A Story of Alabama," chronicles both their own life as a child of Nigerian immigrants and the history of the state as a whole.

"I think Alabama produces really great characters, from its politicians to its preachers and activists," they said about the appeal of Alabama for longform reporting. "There are really great figures to write about here and that’s been the case throughout its history."

Jia Tolentino

For Jia Tolentino, it's very rare that a cold email pitch turns into a story. But in the early part of 2017, one email about a unique documentary project on Alabama immediately grabbed hold of her.

The project was "Whitman, Alabama," a series of documentary vignettes by filmmaker Jennifer Crandall, featuring a different Alabamian from a different walk of life, each reciting a verse from Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself." The poem, which Whitman wrote in 1892, stretches 52 verses and covers the complicated breadth of the human condition, the beauty of the world and the celebration of the individual. Through "Whitman, Alabama," each participant uses a verse to tell something about themselves.

"Her (Crandall's) project shows, deliberately and sometimes unexpectedly, the varied face of a region that is often thought to be homogenous, and a Whitmanesque alchemy materializes: every subject comes off both as an individual with a clear political identity and as part of an indivisible whole," Tolentino wrote in her piece, "Reciting Walt Whitman in a Drug Court in Alabama," which ran in the magazine in March 2017.

As a Southerner herself, Tolentino felt connected to the idea of exploring life in Alabama and the Deep South through a poem.

"It’s about the ways that you can take an element of commonality and explore that oceanic aspect of people and our shared humanity," Tolentino said.

One part of "Whitman, Alabama" that was particularly compelling to Tolentino was Verse 37, where Circuit Judge John Graham oversees a drug court hearing in Scottsboro. At one point, Graham and different people who are at the hearing to discuss their recovery stories begin reciting the verse together as a sort-of call and response.

"There’s a lot of types of life and stages of life that don’t make it to national mainstream news outlets," she said. "Drug court in Alabama is one of them."

Tolentino, who has worked for the magazine since 2016, was born in Toronto, but grew up in Houston. However, Alabama did play a bit part in her life, from summer church camps as a child to occasional trips to Orange Beach for the Hangout Music Festival.

"The Deep South is interesting because of the places where the media are concentrated," she said. "People often see the Deep South as fundamentally other, but as someone who lived there forever, I feel glad that I understand the South, where it’s home and, maybe there are political views I don’t agree with, but it doesn’t feel foreign to me."

Tolentino, who has extensively covered reproductive health rights for the magazine, has also written about abortion restrictions in Alabama as well as women's bodily autonomy when it comes to law enforcement. These issues and more, coupled with her Southern upbringing, allow her to access this region for a readership that may not understand that part of the country.

"There’s a certain kind of knowledge of that part of the South that people don’t see," she said.