Dream Pairings | Vol. 1
Provocative writer collaborations curated by the Switch-Lit community
“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 🔮
Fyodor Dostoyevsky & Jason Reynolds
Curated by: “kkeropis” (Toronto, Canada 🇨🇦)
“I am a ridiculous man. They call me a madman now. That would be a distinct rise in my social standing, were it not that I still seem to them as ridiculous as ever. But now I do not get angry; they are all dear to me now, even when they laugh at me.”
—Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Dream of the Ridiculous Man (1877)“People always look at you funny when you're the one who survived.
Like you're a ghost that forgot to disappear.”
—Jason Reynolds, Long Way Down (2017)
A N A L Y S I S
Synergy: A collision of the subterranean and the street. Both writers are obsessed with the internal moral architecture of young men under extreme societal pressure. Speculation: This work would be a high-velocity and polyphonic narrative with staccato pacing. Imagine the fever dreams of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment rising and falling into the rhythmic, pressurized language of Reynolds’ Long Way Down; a psychological spiral unraveling over a single minute but feels like an eternity. The result would be a visceral exploration of the spiritual weight of one’s legacy and the split-second decisions that define it.
Banana Yoshimoto & Mieko Kawakami
Curated by: “Thea” (Melbourne, Australia 🇦🇺)
“The place I like best in this world is the kitchen.
No matter where it is, no matter what condition,
so long as it is a place where one makes food,
I am content.”
—Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen (1988)“I wanted to know why people always had to choose.
Why couldn't we just be everything at once?
Why did we have to be stuck in these bodies,
eating and sleeping?”
—Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs (2019)
A N A L Y S I S
Synergy: A masterclass in contemporary Japanese Interiority. While Yoshimoto leans into the healing, dreamlike melancholy of grief, Kawakami brings a sharp, visceral, and even brutal examination of the female body and class. Speculation: This collaboration might feel like an edgy lucid dream where Yoshimoto’s signature supernatural softness — perhaps a house haunted by gentle memories — is startled awake by the cold sweat of Kawakami’s dialogue about the physical realities of being a woman in Tokyo. What remains when a clinical modern setting is dissolved by the tides of magical realism?
Paul Auster & Clarice Lispector
Curated by: “Nans” (Mexico City, Mexico 🇲🇽)
“Characters appear, events take place, and it is only in the way they intersect that a story begins to emerge. We are all the authors of our own accidents, wandering through a city that was built by someone else’s dreams.”
—Paul Auster, City of Glass (1985)“I am a forest that is constantly growing over its own paths.
If you follow me, you will only find the place where I used to be, and even then, the trees will have changed their names by the time you arrive."”
—Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (1964)
A N A L Y S I S
Synergy: This is a true arthouse pairing: the architect of coincidences (Auster) meets the mystic of the moment (Lispector). Auster crafts clockwork puzzles of identity and fate while Lispector deconstructs the act of existing until the words themselves seem to vibrate. Speculation: This could be a genre-bending mystery where the detective vanishes by page three, replaced by a meditation on a cockroach or a piece of red string. Auster would give us the unlikely encounter; Lispector takes us into the nervous system. Together, they would turn the macro-labyrinth of New York City into a primal, metaphysical desert — a void in which the reader would be strangely happy to lose themselves.
How far could any two writers take a story worth sharing?
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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