“I don’t think anyone past the pickle shop is getting in,” said Patrick McGraw, gesturing to Sweet Pickle Books, a few doors down from the start of a line that wound around the block outside of Earth, an art space in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
The shivering, chain-smoking, Issey Miyake-clad 20-somethings waited patiently on a Friday in January to get into a reading hosted by Heavy Traffic, a downtown literary publication founded in 2020 by Mr. McGraw, 32.
“People treat readings like going to a gallery opening, screening or any other cultural event that brings tight-knit creative communities together,” said Sam Falb, a 24-year-old New York-based writer waiting in line in the icy night.
The evening’s lineup included the filmmaker Amalia Ulman, 36, the Substacker Sam Kriss, 34, and the author Sheila Heti, 48. When the door opened, a stampede of consciously disheveled young writers temporarily lost their cool, scrambling for a chair, or at least for the opportunity to sit on the floor and vape at the feet of their favorite thinkers. When the room reached its just-under-200-person capacity, many of the remaining would-be attendees lingered outside in the hopes that a space or two would free up at some point. Twice they tried to jam the door open to listen in from the sidewalk.
If Heavy Traffic is a literary publication, it’s not quite a magazine. “Magazines have a theme,” Mr. McGraw said. “They’re also advertiser-bound.” Heavy Traffic had no such obligations, he added, though, in previous issues, the magazine had run advertisements for small businesses, including one for Mr. McGraw’s brother’s calligraphy services. Until recently, the magazine’s costs were funded by Mr. McGraw’s writing work and financial flexibility — “I’d just not eat or not pay rent and print the magazine instead.” Now, he says, they have a couple of patrons.
At the moment, Heavy Traffic is run by a three-man masthead: Mr. McGraw, the editor, the proofreader Joshua Beutum, 23, and the designer Richard Turley, 48, who also works for Interview magazine. Though only a couple of Heavy Traffic’s five issues have featured images, the latest issue comprised only serif text laid out in Mr. Turley’s bold, elegantly chaotic layouts. Contributors run the gamut from architects to well-known authors to unknowns eager to be published. Mr. McGraw said he chose the contributors for each issue with “an intangible thing that ties them together.”
“It’s a little punk,” Mr. Turley said, adding that Mr. McGraw liked people “who don’t quite know what they’re doing.”
Last year, Mr. McGraw took the reading series to Paris, London and Berlin. The events function as opportunities for artists to workshop experimental, untested, unpublished material. Ms. Heti, for example, closed the night with a series of lustful, existential A.I.-chatbot transcripts. “I don’t have anywhere to put this,” she quipped as she rifled through a stack of anonymous conversations.
Some of the magazine’s submissions, Mr. McGraw said, were sent as voice notes, others were incomplete stories at best. The evening’s first reader, Ms. Ulman, who just premiered her film Magic Farm (starring Chloë Sevigny) at Sundance, read for two minutes about a woman who had crawled into a horse carcass. Ms. Ulman wrote a similarly short story, titled “My Dog, My Husband, My Son,” for Heavy Traffic’s latest issue.
Many of the artists who read and publish in Heavy Traffic see the publication as a safe space to say what may be considered impolitic or outré in more established literary circles. As Mr. Kriss settled into his seat, an audience member shout-whispered, “He’s even hotter in person.”
Mr. Kriss had drawn a sizable crowd of angsty boys who spoke of him reverently and suppressed giggles as he read a piece about the presidential inauguration — which Mr. Kriss characterized as “America making fun legal again.”
When the writer Ada Antoinette, 28, read “Protrusion,” a story about a girl who has sex with her brother after their grandfather’s passing, the crowd erupted in laughter when she teased, “This is wrong, but I think grandfather would have approved.”
Afterward, guests lingered under the thermal lamps outside of Earth. When asked what they thought of the most recent issue, surprisingly, many said that they had never actually read Heavy Traffic, but that they were drawn to the scene. “It’s just cool,” said a local college student in an oversize hoodie.
The Heavy Traffic reader, Mr. McGraw admits, does not cross his mind much. “Is that bad?” he asked, laughing. Recently, he discovered that people outside his social circle were not as enthusiastic about the work. “I went on Reddit and I found this thread,” he said. “This guy was like, ‘What’s a magazine that’s representative of downtown New York right now?’ And someone wrote, ‘Probably Heavy Traffic, but unfortunately it’s really, really bad.’”
“At least they hate it,” Mr. McGraw said.
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