About the Digital Archive
What this is
For five years, The ‘Sip Magazine told Mississippi’s story in Mississippi’s own voice. From 2014 to 2019, across fifteen printed issues, it went looking for the people, the food, the music, and the places that make this the most soulful state in the South, something to celebrate and something to share, and it put them on the page with the care they deserved. This site is the archive of that work: every issue, every story, kept online where anyone can read it.
Five years, fifteen issues
Fifteen issues does not sound like much until you hold them. Each one was months of listening: driving the two-lane highways to a farm, a juke joint, or a family kitchen, staying long enough to get the story right, and coming home with something true. Taken together, they are a portrait of Mississippi in a particular moment, drawn with affection and without apology.
The ‘Sip covered a state the rest of the country too often reduces to a headline, and it insisted, issue after issue, that the fuller truth was richer, funnier, more tender, and more complicated than the caricature. It took Mississippi seriously as a subject and generously as a home.
What the magazine built was not circulation. It was trust, earned one conversation at a time, in places that had learned to be careful with outsiders. That is the thing you cannot manufacture, and it is why these stories still hold up.
A porch-side thank you
The ‘Sip was always a grassroots thing, homemade by people who love this place and have a real gift for telling its stories through photos, words, and design, the faithful trinity. It was never one person’s doing, and it never could be.
So this is a porch-side thank you. To the writers who drove the back roads and came home with the truth of a place. To the editors who cared for every sentence until it earned its spot on the page. To the photographers who knew the Mississippi light and waited for it. To the designers who gave the words and the pictures room to breathe. To the artists, cooks, musicians, and makers who opened their doors, their kitchens, and their lives, and trusted us to tell it right. To the readers who found their own towns and their own grandmothers’ recipes on these pages and kept the whole thing going by caring. And to the family, friends, and quiet supporters whose work never lands on a masthead but holds up everything that does.
This archive belongs to all of you as much as it belongs to us. Thank you for making something worth keeping. Take a sip with me.
Why it mattered, and still does
Representation is not a small thing. For a great many Mississippians, The ‘Sip was one of the few places their culture was documented beautifully, by people who lived it. That combination, rigor and love, is rare, and it is the standard everything we make now is measured against.
The magazine stopped printing in 2019. The work did not stop. Everything The Sip Collective does today grew from what The ‘Sip started: the belief that a place is best understood through its people’s own stories, and that those stories deserve craft. The method we practice now, listen first, frame what we heard, vocalize it in the form the story asks for, and connect it back to the people it belongs to, is simply the magazine’s instinct made deliberate. This archive is the root system beneath all of it.
The publication we make now. Themed issues of reported features, interviews, and columns from across Mississippi and the South.
Read AmplifyThe studio. We work with museums, foundations, and communities to turn stories into experiences people can walk into.
Visit the studioRights and permissions
The writing and photography on this site belong to the writers and photographers who made it. It is published here as an archive of the magazine, freely readable, with original credit intact.
To reprint, license, or reuse a story or a photograph, for a book, an exhibit, a classroom, or anything else, please ask first so we can connect you with the right person. Write to [email protected].
If you are a contributor and something here is credited wrong, or you would like your bio or a name updated, tell us and we will fix it.
The ‘Sip Magazine · published in print 2014 to 2019
Archive published by LF Voices Collective, LLC, doing business as The Sip Collective
Vicksburg, Mississippi