“If you could pair any two authors, artists, or storytellers to take turns writing the next chapters of a single story, who would they be?
How might they navigate the tension of a shared page, back-and-forth, bridging their own everyday realities?“
Explore these “dream pairings” curated by Switch-Lit writers, and vote for the collaboration you’d most like to see brought to life.
S••L 🔮
Michael Pollan x Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka “Dr. Seuss”)
Curated by: “Elsa” (Lakewood, Colorado, USA 🇺🇸):
“The world we inhabit is not a place we merely find, but a place we help to summon; the mind and the world are a single, entangled event.”
—Michael Pollan, A World Appears (2026)“Think left and think right and think low and think high.
Oh, the thinks you can think up if only you try!”
—Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Thinks You can Think! (1975)
A N A L Y S I S
Synergy: Together, they treat the subconscious as a vast ecosystem: Pollan maps the dissolution of the ego with journalistic rigor, while “Dr. Seuss” provides the vibrant, rubbery, non-Euclidean dreamscapes for the unpaved mind. Speculation: As a special companion to Pollan’s latest exploration on consciousness A World Appears, we might find the Lorax officiating a mycelial wedding and Sneetches undergoing "ego-death" in kaleidoscopic Star-Off machines. It is a playful field guide to navigate our sensory chaos, suggesting that when the rigid self disappears, a whimsical and interconnected world of Zelfs and Loxes appears in its place.
R.F. Kuang x Ocean Vuong
Curated by: “Rama Lama” (Utrecht, NL 🇳🇱)
“I am thinking of the word translation. How it can mean both a carrying across and a destruction."
—Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)“Translation means doing violence upon the original, means tearing the poem from its moorings and ridding it of its soul."
—R.F. Kuang, Babel (2022)
A N A L Y S I S
Synergy: Two Asian-American authors of different genres and styles joined by their treatment of the English language as a site of violence and mourning. Kuang views translation as a tool for colonial theft; Vuong sees it as a mask distancing child from illiterate parent. Speculation: They script a surreal fantasy graphic novel where “untranslatable” words are embodied spirits harvested from the vocal cords of the colonized to power empires in a new age of information. Kuang designs the oppressive and geometric setting while Vuong’s protagonist starts a silent rebellion that bleeds across the page, physically dissolving the panel borders and language itself.
Max Ernst x Doechii
Curated by: “Cloudy Blue” (Cologne, GER 🇩🇪)
“And Loplop, bird superior, has transformed himself into flesh without flesh and will dwell among us."
—Max Ernst, Cahiers d'Art (1937)“I call myself the ‘Swamp Princess’, so I wanted everyone to actually see what that environment is.”
—Doechii, Interview Magazine (2024)
A N A L Y S I S
Synergy: A wild Subrosa pairing of the OG Dadaist (Ernst) and the "Swamp Bitch" of hip-hop (Doechii). Both utilize persona and alter-egos as surreal fodder, defined with the grotesque, the animalistic, and subversive. Speculation: They might craft a lively libretto or tone poem where Ernst’s Swamp Angel is reimagined in the Florida Everglades and brought to life by the sonic heartbeat of Doechii’s rapid-fire internal rhymes. Their moss-covered deity with Victorian lace wings, dripping with muck, is on a mythical quest to mutate all members of polite society into fellow avian hybrids.
How far could any two writers take a story worth sharing?
Submit your own "dream pairing"
What if one of them is you?
Switch-Lit’s mission is to manifest the collective imagination of diverse writing communities through the connective power of collaborative fiction, poetry, and prose.
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