Behind the Veil of Ignorance
Newsletter 009
Dear Writer,
After Winter must come Spring.
What signals the arrival of Spring in your current place? What seasonal changes and sensations have you felt in your everyday life this May? What else is patiently waiting to blossom, and because of you?
Switch-Lit launched in the Winter of 2023 and has grown by word-of-mouth into a semi-private yet highly global community of writers, poets, and storytellers across cultures and disciplines. This Spring we’re preparing to introduce new Switch-Lit features that begin to fulfill our original position and vision: Two writers take turns crafting chapters of a single story or poem, as “equals in imagination”, and with their identities kept secret from one another until the story ends.
What does it mean to write a story or poem with a stranger? Tell us how how you feel below, and we’ll be sure to design around your feedback first:
Your feedback will directly shape the Switch-Lit platform, inspire a new collaborative storytelling tradition, and support both a timely and timeless purpose underneath it all: The possibility to co-create an imagined world that is both free and equal by removing our cognitive biases from the start.
This weekend, the New York Times writer Jennifer Szalai upheld this notion in her review “Can a 50-Year-Old Idea Save Democracy?” (link) of Free and Equal: A Manifesto for a Just Society by
who makes a vigorous case to adopt a framework for liberalism laid out by political philosopher John Rawls in the 1970s:“Rawls’s theory was premised on the thought experiment of the “original position,” in which individuals would design a just society from behind a “veil of ignorance.” People couldn’t know whether they would be born rich or poor, gay or straight, Black or white — and so… each would be motivated to realize a society that would be accepted as fair even by the most vulnerable. This is liberalism grounded in reciprocity rather than selfishness or altruism.”
It is from behind this familiar “veil of ignorance”, we play, craft, and wonder: how free and equal can two Switch-Lit writers similarly feel and become when they do not know the identities of one another at the start of their story?
Sometimes we must escape our reality before we can re-create it.
Change comes eventually,
– Ken
S••L Editor
Featured prompt:
Prompt 1
The semi-truck weighed two tons. The cargo was alive. The driver suddenly felt sleepy…
by Switch-Lit
Did you know?
On the night of May 9, 2024, a semi-track hauling 15 million honey bees used to pollinate blueberry fields each Spring crashed and overturned on the highway in Clinton, Maine (USA). First responders didn’t realize the cargo was live honey bees until firefighters descended an embankment to check for leaking fluids. After suffering multiple bee stings, first responders summoned local beekeepers to successfully corral the bees.
(Read the full story here)
Don’t give up.
Everything is everything
What is meant to be, will be
After Winter must come Spring
Change, it comes eventually
I wrote these words for everyone
Who struggles in their youth
Who won’t accept deception
Instead of what is truth
It seems we lose the game
Before we even start to play
Who made these rules? (We’re so confused)
Easily led astray
Let me tell you that
Everything is everything
– “Everything is Everything” from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill
Contact us:
📟 Ping us with any questions, requests, or proposals for Switch-Lit:
editors@switch-lit.com