Letter from the Editor

My first introduction to magazines was the beauty salon. I remember it like it was yesterday. Me riding to Philadelphia, MS, with my grandmother every other weekend as she went to get her hair done. I would sit, waiting for her to finish, and in the meantime, I would pick up whatever edition of Jet magazine was present. Flipping through the pages, feeling the weight of the issues. It was a ritual to me. I could barely understand what they were talking about, but the images captivated me.

As I grew older and entered into my teeny-bopper era, my next love was J-14 and Tiger Beat. I fell in love with free posters and age-appropriate information about my favorite Disney stars at the time. I eventually landed on Seventeen Magazine. I would plan my life through the clippings of each issue. A mood board here, a vision board there. Whatever I found exciting at the time.

As I matured, Essence and Vogue began to feel like home to me. From the layout to the stories, I could always find a piece of myself in them. It seems that no matter what stage I am at in life, magazines have always managed to be there for me.

As I entered college, I had no idea what I was doing with my life. Attempting to find my footing, I started as a theatre major. By the next semester, after rigorous hours of set building and working backstage at plenty of shows, I learned soon enough that theatre was not for me. I spoke to one of my friends about journalism, and after not much debate and being willing to try just about anything, I decided to take Communications Law . The required prerequisite to just about every journalism course at Ole Miss.

From there, I was pretty much set on journalism, even though I didn't know where my life was going. I studied a bit of everything during that time period. Film was my minor, African-American studies was my favorite class of all time, and somehow I even wound up in fashion merchandising (a very “fly in the buttermilk” moment for me). An unfortunate blessing in disguise for all Journalism students, we were required to take graphic design. We had several projects that involved racking my brain with InDesign, but one stood out the most. We had to design a magazine. Our goal was to pick the article from a bunch of pre-selected articles, name it, brand it, and even had to make an app in EnVision. It was the most fun I had ever had in that class. At the time, I named it “BRWN” (very basic, I know). I imagined it as if Essence and Vogue had a baby. A love child of sorts. High Fashion and Lifestyle dripped in prestige and legacy but aimed at black women. I didn’t realize until we received that assignment how distant I felt from my first love.

After the project was over and I somehow walked away with a B, I wasn’t quite ready to let the idea die. I fell in love with the thought of creating my love child, but as life and college went on, I had to start being more realistic about my future. The magazine would come in and out of my mind. I changed the name, but still had no mission or vision. No idea of how I would make it work, if I could even get people to talk to me, until eventually I just let it go. Every now and then, the idea would come to mind, but I typically pushed it to the back of my brain again.

In September of last year, freshly back in Mississippi after living in Atlanta for four years, still confused about what was happening with my life, I scrolled through some Canva mock-ups of magazine covers I created years ago. Concepts I let die with age and frustration. I decided to revisit it.

I mean, if my future is still up in the air, what’s wrong with playing with an idea from my past? It took months to reach out for help. Even more to set up meetings, and I eventually grew the balls to email people asking for interviews. There’s been a dark cloud of dread and doubt hanging over me for the past few years. It formed out of the fear that I would look silly trying to make this work, and truth be told, I probably did, but for some reason this time, I no longer cared.

I realized a while ago that I was obsessed with having the perfect conditions. It took a while to learn that perfectionism is the enemy of progress (cliché, I know), and if I kept waiting for things to be perfect, they would never exist. And if they never exist, I will simply be back in this same space in 5 years, wondering what could have been all over again.

Now, I want to make it exist. I'll worry about making it perfect later.