This photo story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here, or pick up the summer issue as one-off purchase here.
Patrick McGraw insists he has no place being in the literary world—and when he starts to tell you about his life, you kind of understand what he means.
Born in Sechelt, Canada, where he was raised by his brothers, McGraw was a high school dropout. Yet in his late teens, he won a place at one of Europe’s most prestigious architecture colleges. His classmates in London were the children of oligarchs, chauffeured to lectures as he struggled with living costs. McGraw couldn’t afford to finish his studies and ended up in New York City, where he launched his magazine, Heavy Traffic. In the space of five years, it’s become one of the only literary magazines worth reading.
Though he’s published some of the best novelists of the last four decades—Lynne Tillman, Chris Kraus, Bud Smith, Sean Thor Conroe—McGraw gravitates to unknown writers, often molding their work through close edits. Artists and architects contribute regularly, setting Heavy Traffic apart from trends such as Alt Lit—which McGraw categorizes as “a cesspool, a morass”—and autofiction. The magazine’s design is at least as singular: later issues have no photographs or illustrations, just text with the magazine’s first story beginning on the cover, distinctive details that come courtesy of English graphic designer Richard Turley.
With no formal training, McGraw’s first writing was “filled with mistakes a child would make.” This outsider aspect is inherent to Heavy Traffic, which combines the intellectual introspection of European prose with a carnivalesque attitude that feels distinctly American. Every category of drug use was represented in the magazine’s origins. “Pharmaceuticals, coke, opiates; each person involved had a different pet drug. Doing a boatload of drugs is a palliative to the monastic life you have to lead to be a writer,” asserts McGraw, who’s now sober.
Since launching in 2020, Heavy Traffic has often been mentioned in the same breath as Dimes Square, the downtown Manhattan scene which, depending on who you ask, is either the return of the literal Brownshirts, or just another “authenticity psyop,” to borrow a line from the magazine’s second issue. McGraw hates this association—“I would rather kill myself than think any more about Dimes Square”—insisting that the mag has a purity which sets it apart.
“Heavy Traffic transcends whatever contemporary bullshit we happen to be going through. Someone wrote a brilliant piece that touched on Ukraine, but I won’t publish anything too temporal,” he explains. “Most magazines exist to be of their time; I want to take the long view.”
As Heavy Traffic doesn’t run adverts, the main source of income comes from sales. This year, a New York Times article about it (“A Magazine, Hard to Define, Draws a Contrarian Crowd”) touched on the subject of patrons—could these include Randian tech billionaire Peter Thiel, who has reportedly funded events connected to Dimes Square, or indeed the CIA, which is said to have historic ties to the Paris Review? “It’s just so funny that people think the CIA or Thiel would be the worst sources of funding, especially in a city as gluttonous as New York, but all of our funding has come from the most milquetoast art places—I wish it were more exciting than that.”
Last winter, McGraw took Heavy Traffic on a tour of Europe, including stops in London, Paris, and Berlin: “I was in this relationship that was ending so everything was colored by that, a dark night of the soul condensed into a week.”
Surrounded by silent City workers—“just this level of introspection, grayness, and Englishness I’d forgotten existed”—McGraw’s train from Heathrow set the tone for his entire trip. Though the events went well (the London reading had a fizz that’s rare for the city), this time he found Berlin the “most depressing place I’ve been in my life.” He retreated to his friend’s apartment, staying there until his flight three days later. He was so eager to leave, he arrived at the airport seven hours early.
Back on American soil, McGraw started writing the story of his teenage years and how he ended up living with his brothers. The resulting memoir (“I hate that term, obviously”) will cover the period during the 2000s when he developed his “almost autistic view” of words, growing up obsessed with New York and books about the city’s architecture.
Now that he calls it home, he’s started seeing stories in the brickwork. “If you want to get a building done, you sell a developer a narrative [about] what it’s going to do for the community,” he explains, “but the reality is extremely dark; there’s blood money, destruction, and gentrification.” For McGraw, literature and architecture are both dying mediums, yet writing, narrativization, and fiction remain more important than ever. “Writing is able to deal with the dark realities of how we’re living today,” he says.
This photo story is from the summer 2025 issue of VICE magazine, THE REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL ISSUE. Get four issues each year, sent straight to your door, by subscribing here, or pick up the summer issue as one-off purchase here.
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