Screen Door, Okra, or Thicket?

What do you call a magazine about Alabama? It’s tricky: you’ve got to find something that doesn’t alienate a particular group, something that says “Alabama” in an evocative, clever, and poetic way, and that looks good on everything from a magazine cover to a subscription card to a T-shirt. Easier said than done. For example, here are a few of our early working titles, with parenthetical analysis: Yellowhammer (too affiliated with Alabama football, already used by other companies around the state). Red Clay (it stains). Screen Door (it slams). Okra (sounds like a food magazine). Camellia (too feminine). Cotton (too past). 22 (clever…we’re the 22nd state…but too obscure). The list goes on.

In fact, the list made by Paul Crawford and Paul Halupka, who have helped us from the earliest stages figure out what this magazine should look and feel like, was so long the day we met at V. Richard’s Market in Birmingham that I freaked out a little. SO MANY CHOICES! But as Paul Halupka (affectionately known as “The Other Paul”) started reading them off, we quickly honed in on a few. Blackberry. Picket Fence. We kept going. And then we hit Thicket. And we stopped and looked at each other as if to say, “Yeah.”

Thicket was really the flip side of a title I had played around with for weeks: The Clearing. Because as you probably already know, Alabama means “I clear the thicket” in Choctaw. I was exploring the “clearing” idea: a magazine where we could clear space and sit down and talk about things. But The Original Paul and The Other Paul went with the Thicket side: the network of connections, the entanglements, the Native-American, French, Spanish, black, white, Hispanic, jumbled-up, wonderful culture of our state. It sounded cool. It had energy. And it looked even better when we created a logo and slapped it on a mock-up cover.

So that’s the story of the title. From emails and chats over afternoon beers and opinions from friends and neighbors to finally a list of hundreds of names in a big black notebook opened on a table at a coffeeshop in the summertime—it’s what we landed on. Landed in. Landed in the Thicket.

Posted by Julie Keith