Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 the big day is so nearly here.

Release Day is our global celebration where creative people collectively release their work. A communal moment for creators to overcome the fear that keeps our work hidden and finally hit publish.

Being brought to life in partnership with CreativeMornings and Adobe.

I will be hosting the Release Day celebrations from at CreativeMornings New York chapter! Come along to Newlab 08.30-10.00am if you are in town.

🥂 Plus… join me and other Releasers for some Release Day celebratory drinks at Ace Hotel Brooklyn, Lobby Bar @ 6pm EST, May 29.

There are also IRL celebrations in the following places: Barcelona, Austin
Santa Cruz, Portland, Philadelphia, Denver, Chicago + a Virtual Livestream @ 12-1pm EST.

People Are Afraid to Share Their Work. It’s Time we Ditch The Algorithm And Embrace Human Creativity And Connection

Sam Furness and Tina Roth Eisenberg on why we need new rituals to connect and celebrate our humanness.

With an onslaught of AI-generated content, optimized newsfeeds, and collective despair, there’s never been a more important time for sharing our human creativity.

Putting your creative ideas into the world can change your life. It increases your surface area of luck. It opens doors. It helps you find your people, and better understand others.

Research on the links between creative expression and mental health has shown its positive influence on emotional regulation, cognitive flexibility, and social connectedness.

Yet crucially, for creativity to benefit society, it has to be shared.

As two founders of global creative communities, we’ve seen how transformative it can be when people nurture their innate creativity and curiosity. In 2008, Tina started what’s now the world’s largest face-to-face gathering, CreativeMornings, spanning 250+ cities in 70 countries. And Sam runs Creative Quests, a platform where people across the world join in shared explorations and experiments.

But we’ve also noticed a concerning trend. People are more afraid to share their creative work than ever, arguably when we need human expression and connection the most.

If this crisis of creative withholding is the symptom, a diminishing of optimism is the cause. We see this reflected in Edelman’s 2026 Trust Barometer, where only 32% of people globally believe the next generation will be better off.

Being creative relies on optimism. By definition, it’s the ability to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, and bring it into being. To do that, we have to believe a better way is possible.

And yet, it’s understandable why people feel blocked by fear and its many guises, including doubt, perfectionism, and procrastination.

Making time for our creative ideas, let alone sharing something with the world, is an increasingly daunting task. We’re bombarded by distractions, judgement and division. To share is to open ourselves to criticism.

For those who manage to summon the courage to share something online, all too often their precious work is swept up in the algorithm, disappearing sooner than initials written in sand.

Something that should be a celebration feels deeply unfulfilling and isolating. Now, instead of creating, we simply consume. And we don’t even decide what we consume—the algorithm does. With each mindless scroll, we’re further lulled into passivity, becoming further disconnected from ourselves, and others.

We don’t think it’s a coincidence that this crisis of creative withholding coincides with the epidemic of loneliness and isolation, affecting millions of Americans. The two are intertwined: creativity does not flourish in isolation; and people don’t flourish without creativity.

Being open to new experiences not only boosts creativity, but also brings us into connection with other people—which we need for a thriving democracy. As social scientist Robert Putnam’s famed “Bowling Alone” research found, American social capital has plummeted since the 1960s, evidenced by decreased civic participation, volunteering, and socializing.

The best way to reverse this trend is to bring people together—and creativity is one way to do just that. As Pete Davis says in the documentary Join Or Die based on Putnam’s research, “Community is what happens when you do what you love together.”

When we do things together, we can begin to shift from the individualism that is damaging to mental health and exacerbating loneliness, toward a more connected, cooperative and optimistic future.

This unwavering belief in a better, less lonely future is what drives the work we each do. Every day, through our virtual and in-person gatherings, we see the desire people have to overcome various blocks and bring their creative ideas to life. We just need more supportive opportunities to do so.

That’s what led Sam to create Release Day, an invitation for people around the world to share their work simultaneously on May 29.

Having spent ten years working in the music industry, Sam always loved the day an album was released. It was customary to wish somebody a “Happy Release Day,” to recognize the hard work everyone put in.

Now in its second year, Release Day extends this feeling of celebration to all types of human expression. Rather than getting lost in the algorithm, creative ideas get their moment to shine. Suddenly, what was daunting becomes exciting.

Last year, the collective deadline gave people permission to finally begin. In just a few weeks, participants moved through years of procrastination to release songs, essays, paintings, films, websites, zines, first drafts, and long-overdue projects.

While research shows that public commitments and structured deadlines produce better outcomes than private goals, the psychology of accountability is secondary to the feeling of belonging a shared moment creates.

Instead of feeling isolated and alone, with Release Day, you’re part of a community of thousands of participants who are also invested in your success, because they’re sharing and celebrating alongside you. Perhaps for the first time in someone’s life, they can feel like their creative ideas are worth sharing. Such opportunities can change people for the better, bringing more connection, resilience, and confidence.

We need to protect these avenues for optimism, because they are the very antidote to the fear, passivity, and loneliness we are witnessing. We need to create opportunities to flourish together, so we can move towards a better way of being in the world.

Optimism is not only central to our creativity, it’s contagious. When people put things into the world that light them up, it lights up everyone around them. Just like a fireworks display is made more spectacular with each spark, so is the world with each varied and dazzling contribution of human expression.

What Will You Release?

🏡 Based in London? Come to our day retreat!

Join us on Saturday 20th June at Kindred London for a day of playful exploration, illumination conversation and a communal lunch.

Rediscover what play means to you and make some creative connections along the way.

Book your place

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off in July.
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam
Quester-in-chief
📲 @creative.quests

📬 From the Desk of the Curiosity Correspondent

Dear Questers,

Hannah Singleman here 👋 Your newly appointed Curiosity Correspondent at Creative Quests HQ.

It’s nice to meet ya!
I’m a longtime Quester living in NYC, where I work as a curiosity consultant and Head of Creative Questions at Now What. I spend a lot of my life chasing creative rabbit holes, collecting questions, and paying attention to the strange little things that make people feel more connected, inspired, and alive. I also love collage, live music, wandering the city, and my rescue cat.

What is a Curiosity Correspondent I hear you ask?
Part reporter, part creative traveller, part person who started Questing five years ago and can’t imagine stopping.

This year we want to liberate the magic of Questing.
I’ve been a Quester long enough to know that something real happens when you are Questing. Something that’s genuinely hard to explain until you’re in it. This year, I’m giving it a whirl anyway…

In 2026, Creative Quests is organising around a bold new idea: Citizens of Curiosity. An ongoing experiment in collective curiosity.

Here’s what we know to be true so far: Curiosity is a place.

A place where creativity flourishes, connection is nurtured, and creative lives feel more intertwined and less isolated. A place where more ideas make it out of people’s hearts and into the world. We don’t have the full picture yet (we’re still in the thick of it!) but one thing feels certain: the world needs more of it.

Each month you’ll hear insights and stories collected along the path of living The Quest Life. Consider this your first dispatch.

Over & out,
Hannah
CQHQ Curiosity Correspondent

Dispatch 01: An Imagination Training Plan

In February 2026, we gathered curious humans from around the world to immerse themselves in the theme of Imagination.

The good news: imagination is a muscle.
Even better news: you already have one.

Here are 6 ways to start using it. Start anytime, anywhere.

1. Hitchhike Through Other Minds

Something we discovered during our Quest on Imagination is that you don’t always know what’s possible until you travel through someone else’s imagination. It’s hard to dream what you don’t yet know is even dreamable.

Find a person, living or dead, whose brain seems to work differently from yours. Start with their work. Watch their interviews. Then go deeper: read what they read, watch what shaped them, trace the obsessions behind the obsessions. The more imaginations you move through, the more your own has to work with. All you have to do is stick out your thumb and catch a ride.

2. Collect Your Fuck Yeahs

“Fuck yeah” is like your imagination raising its hand. That moment when the voice inside your head goes, oooh, that’s cool. A painting, a song, someone’s handwriting, graffiti on the subway, a sentence in a book, overheard dialogue on the street, the way someone laughs, a font on a takeout menu, a stranger’s tattoo, an old photograph, a weird little shop window.

No rhyme or reason, just something that lights you up. Start collecting these moments. Trust them even when you can’t explain them.

As Grace Jones once said: “If the fuck don’t feel right, don’t fuck it.”

I suppose she’s talking about the inverse, but you get the idea.

3. Inhabit Possibility

One genre that came up over and over again during our Imagination Quest? Sci-fi.

I think this is because sci-fi writers do imagination professionally: they build new worlds, solve their logic, and help make the impossible feel lived-in. So it stands to reason that if we want to train our imagination, we should read more sci fi. The more time we spend inside fully-realized alternatives (futures, pasts, parallel presents, utopias, dystopias…the list goes on), the more we build a tolerance for worlds where the how has already been solved differently. And so, the harder it becomes to believe the world we have is the only one possible.

Not sure where to start? Here’s who Questers are reading: Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, Mœbius, Becky Chambers, and Vandana Singh.

4. Check Your Closet

In his latest book How to Fall in Love with the Future, activist, writer, and February’s very own Guest Quester, Rob Hopkins calls on readers to adjust their “disbelief suspenders,” the things that allow us to put cynicism and other limiting beliefs aside when we’re trying to imagine our way into a world that doesn’t exist yet. That got me thinking: what other imagination gear might we own that just needs some dusting off?

Maybe you have a thinking cap lying around? Don it when you’re met with one of those whimsical, wacky, or otherwise weird ideas you simply must chase. Perhaps some fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants trousers? Great for days when you’ve decided that not knowing where you’re going is the whole point. A little uncomfortable at first, sure, but maybe the most freeing thing you own.

5. BYOP: Bring Your Own Permission

I’ll let you in on a secret from my time as a Curiosity Correspondent. Imagination – real, pure, unadulterated imagination – isn’t bureaucratic. The most imaginative people I know are gloriously, stubbornly ungoverned. They know there’s no committee to approve their ideas. No office handing out licenses to imagine boldly or create out loud or just do the damn thing. So take a page out of their book and bring your own permission to the party. Trust me: it makes for a better party.

6. When In Doubt, Imagine Together

Find the rooms where collective imagination is already happening. Then get in them.

We’ve felt it during our Quests: a room full of people immersed in the same theme, seeing the world through the same lens, and suddenly making connections nobody could have made alone. Friendships form across continents. Creative projects appear out of nowhere. People surprise themselves. That’s not luck. That’s what collective imagination looks like in practice.

Imagination loves company. Find these places! Find these people! They’re out there waiting! And if you want a place to start, join our next Quest - it kicks off in July and the early bird list is open now!

Learn more about our Quest programme

🎆 Release Day

We are officially at the mid-way point on the road to Release Day. So far 2000 (!) of you have accepted our challenge to release a creative project on May 29.

It’s not too late to pledge your commitment and join a whole programme of free workshops, community, resources and IRL celebrations. Sign up here.

In partnership with CreativeMornings and made possible by Adobe.

Here are some Release Day highlights so far!
✷ Creative Quests founder Sam Furness and CreativeMornings founder Tina Roth-Eisenberg spoke to Design Observer about making our creative lives more connected.
✷ shouted out Release Day on his Instagram - which perfectly syncs with his upcoming book release ‘Don’t Call It Art’
✷ Seeing the RD gallery wall fill up with your works in progress!

What Will You Release?

🏡 Based in London? Come to our day retreat!

Join us on Saturday 20th June at Kindred London for a day of playful exploration, illumination conversation and a communal lunch.

Rediscover what play means to you and make some creative connections along the way.

Book your place

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off in July
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
CQ HQ
For people fuelled by curiosity
📲 @creative.quests

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 I hope this newsletter finds you playful! If not… I may have just the thing to change that.

Everything is full steam ahead in our Questy world right now!

🎆 Release Day 2026

This years edition, in partnership with CreativeMornings and Adobe, is gathering quite a pace! At the time of writing 1700 people have pledged that they will release a creative project on May 29th. Got a creative project you’ve been procrastinating on? Release Day is calling! It’s three weeks until our collective deadline.

Release Your Creative Project

🛝 Stay Playful: a day of play with Creative Quests

We are hosting our first day retreat, in London! The start of more IRL Creative Quests gatherings.

🗓️ Sat 20th June
⏰ 9.30am - 5.00pm
📍 Kindred, London
£50 inc a communal lunch

Book your place

Join Sam Furness, founder of Creative Quests, for a day of creative exploration, genuine connection, and rediscovering wonder in the everyday. Through playful activities, an exploratory walk through Hammersmith, and open conversation, you will explore what play means to you and how to make more space for it in your life.

Hosted at the gorgeous Kindred, in Hammersmith - a space for community to connect face to face, with no one feeling excluded. They believe that people do better when connected with others, and so do we!

This event is part of a collection of thoughtful, in-person experiences that Kindred are hosting, designed to bring people together and foster a sense of belonging. Aligned with the national Loneliness Awareness Week campaign by the Marmalade Trust, the campaign encourages more open conversations around loneliness while creating space for meaningful relationships and shared experiences.

What to expect

In true Creative Quests spirit - this is not about switching off from the world. It is about engaging with it differently.

Using Kindred as our base, we will head out into Hammersmith to explore, gather inspiration, and treat the city as our creative playground. Along the way, you will take part in a mix of guided and self led activities designed to spark curiosity and shift perspective.

Together, we will experiment, enjoy a communal lunch, and make things inspired by what we discover.

🎟️ Come and join us on Sat 20th June!

📣 Playing Out Loud can change your life and banish your procrastination. It did mine.

If you are feeling deeply stuck on a long term project, this one’s for you.

The answer likely isn’t in working harder, but taking a playful detour.

Six years ago, on the eve of my 31st birthday, the UK went into a nationwide lockdown. (Don’t worry, this isn’t turning into a pandemic reflection piece.)

Birthday plans, project plans, any plans in fact - all went up in a cloud of smoke.

It looked as if my birthday was destined to be spent inside my house, video calling friends and family to receive birthday wishes and talk about how ‘unprecedented’ this moment in time was.

That was until, I felt something stir in me.

A playful questioning.

What if my lockdown birthday was the most connected I had ever felt on a birthday? What if I celebrated my birthday with all my friends - but none of them were invited?

After a quick photoshop session - I published this invitation on my Instagram and Twitter:

To attend my solo birthday party: people could send me a challenge to fulfil in my house. It could be as imaginative, weird or sentimental as they liked - what mattered was that they had thought about it.

By my birthday morning I had 60 playful challenges to complete in my house - all neatly organised in a google doc.

I spent all day hanging out in the imaginations of my friends and family (and a couple of random people from the internet). Everything from: ‘wear all your clothes at once’, ‘create an art installation about lockdown’ and ‘Do something impressive in reverse’

I completed the final challenge, ‘write a letter to your 35 year old self’', at 1am. Exhausted and elated in equal measure.

It was without doubt, one of the best birthdays I’ve ever had.

If you really want - you can watch how the whole day folded out right here.

In the week following, I had conversations with various friends who all said the same thing: this is one of the best things I’ve ever seen you do. It should be a thing!

I couldn’t help but feel a deep irony. I had been endlessly iterating on how to launch Creative Quests for about 3 years at this point… yet this silly day of play was what captured people’s imaginations.

I decided it was a worthy a detour.

And so, Playing House, was born.

Every weekend for three months in lockdown I published ‘10 creative challenges to turn your house in a playground’. A way to reclaim weekends as a time for play, exploration and connection in a time where all those things were in short supply.

The aim was simply to Stay Playful, which has become somewhat of an M.O in my life, full stop.

Staying playful got me, and a fair few other people, through those first few months of the pandemic that were so wracked with uncertainty.

The act of routinely playing out loud unlocked a confidence I hadn’t felt in years. It reminded me how creative I was.

Short, energetic, challenge-focused play days lit up the same part of my brain that finishing a project felt like. Dare I say… it felt even better?

Time wise, the risk was so low. The only risk was feeling silly. The reward was having completed something, putting ideas out there, connecting with others who were also Playing House every weekend.

You can download a free PDF of the 100 playful challenges I did at home in 2020.

Fast forward to June 2020 and I ran a live version of Playing House through CreativeMornings virtual FieldTrips. 300 people showed up and played out loud together for 90 minutes - making hats from household materials, writing postcards from other planets and imagining their worlds through different lenses.

The amount of positive energy I got from this globally connective encounter gave me the confidence and inspiration to push through three years of procrastination and finally launch Creative Quests.

When we Play Out Loud, people recognise our bravery. It’s a way to send a positive signal to the world. Play helps us connect, create, and feel more alive. When life feels heavy, play brings lightness, energy, and new possibilities.

In the present day, our current Release Day campaign is partnered with CreativeMornings - and sponsored by Adobe (our largest partnership to date).

This can all be traced back to making a commitment to Stay Playful and invite others to do the same.

Playing out loud changed my life. It can change yours too.

Stay Playful: 20th June

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off in July
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Dear Questers,

What a week! Since we announced Release Day 2026 in partnership CreativeMornings and Adobe we have a fair few new people here! Welcome.

As a quick reintroduction: I’m Sam Furness, the Quester-in-Chief at Creative Quests. I’ve dedicated the last decade of my life to exploring the edges of my curiosity - and I’m on a mission to inspire others to do the same.

Creative Quests is a global catalyst for collective curiosity and creative living.

We create experiences [learning journeys, publications, events, installations] that guide people to live more adventurous creative lives rooted in possibility and connection.

Over the last 5 years we’ve gathered creative humans from around the world to spend one month immersing their curiosity in a perception expanding theme. We’ve explored everything from Poetry to Colour, Rewilding to Time.

This year we are particularly interested in how exploring your curiosity and creativity can be in service of a more connected, playful and caring world.

Our next Quest kicks off in July! Register your interest now & receive an early bird discount.

The road to Release Day 2026 kicks off on Monday!

On May 29 we are inviting people around the world to overcome procrastination, push past perfectionism and release a creative project.

So far we have had over ONE THOUSAND PEOPLE pledge to releasing a creative project on 29th May. Take a moment to imagine the amount of good energy contained in that amount of projects entering into the world on one day?! The world might just spin a little faster on May 29.

Throughout May have a - completely free of charge - programme of newsletters, workshops, co-creating sessions, private community and celebration events to help you craft and release your work.

The world needs what you are creating! It’s time to share what you’ve been working on.

Our community and newsletter kick off on Monday 27th April. Cohort sessions begin on Friday 1st May. Go check out the full programme and join us.

Sign up to Release Day

Living and Loving the Questions

Over the course of April, we have been exploring the theme of QUESTION in our Quest programme. One of things I love most about Questing in groups, is how much the people and the theme itself can alter the atmosphere of the exploration.

Some Quests feel loud and energetic. Some Quests feel more cognitive and conversational.

Questing on Questions has felt a little softer, introspective, and searching. We’ve opened up to one another about the questions in our lives. Questions are an olive branch, a means of connection.

When the month kicked off, we immediately jumped into how we might answer questions in creative ways - an almost knee jerk instinct to find certainty. Perhaps in an effort to find something to cling on to.

As the month has progressed we have all been getting more comfortable with not searching for answers, but sitting with the questions themselves. Letting them linger and seep into our way of moving through the world. Phrases like ‘liminal space’ ‘the void’ ‘navigating uncertainty’ have been popping up more and more.

It’s felt really liberating.

This shift in relationship to Questions has, in no small part, been brought about by our special Guest Quester this month: Elizabeth Weingarten - author of ‘How To Fall in Love with Questions’.

Why “Embrace Uncertainty” Falls Short

During a difficult time - questioning both her marriage and career - Elizabeth turned to self-help books and podcasts for answers. But she kept coming across what felt like hollow advice.: “embrace uncertainty.”

As she put it to our Quester cohort, the advice felt “so empty and so tone-deaf to what I was experiencing. I didn’t want to embrace uncertainty. I just wanted answers to my questions and I wanted them fast.”

Discovering “Living the Questions”

Around this time, Elizabeth discovered Letters to a Young Poet by poet Rainer Maria Rilke. And one passage just wouldn’t let her imagination rest…

Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

— Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke helps us realise - that when we obsess over finding answers rather than sitting with questions, we miss opportunities to learn, grow, and let the world surprise us.

In our workshop, Elizabeth introduced a framework to help us understand and categorize the questions we’re holding.

Asking Questions like a fruit tree.

One of the most illuminating and useful things we learnt from Elizabeth is her poetic framework for identifying and asking better questions - likening them to part of a fruit tree. You can always count of Questing to lead you to unusual analogies and practices!

🍑 Peach Questions – Short-term answerable questions

Just as peaches ripen quickly, you’ll get answers to these questions quickly. Examples: “Will I get the job?” or “Should I go to this event?”

🌳 Pawpaw Questions – Longer-term answerable questions

It takes a pawpaw tree 5-7 years to grow fruit. These questions are answerable, but on a longer time horizon. Examples: “Should I stay in this relationship?” or “Will this career change bring me more meaning?”

💛 Heartwood Questions – Questions that stay with you for life

Heartwood is the inner wood of the tree that provides balance and stability. These questions help you return to your core. Examples: “Who am I?” or “How do I live a life of meaning and purpose?” You might never answer these permanently - they evolve with you.

🍂 Dead Leaf Questions – Questions to release

These questions don’t ripen into answers and often don’t serve you. They’re usually about past decisions: “Why did we break up?” or “What if I had done it differently?” If a question isn’t helping you grow and move forward, it’s time to let it go.

As we move through our final week of Questing with Questions - these fruity definitions are helping us move toward questions that matter and creative ways to explore them.

We’d love to hear how these definitions help you craft your own Questions! let us know in the comments.

Leave a comment

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off in July
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 Coming at you with a very exciting announcement.

Release Day is back for 2026! And what’s more… we are partnering with CreativeMornings and Adobe to make this the biggest global celebration of creativity yet.

What is Release Day?

A 24-hour global celebration and collective deadline for creative people everywhere to finally share the project they’ve been dreaming of.

Procrastination. Perfectionism. Fear of rejection.

There are many reasons why the creative projects we care about most don’t see the light of day.

We’ve learned that two particular factors get in the way of us finding the courage to share our ideas with the world: a lack of community and a lack of deadline.

Release Day gives you both.

Throughout May we are hosting a whole programme of workshops, virtual community gatherings, and newsletters through CreativeMornings to come together with other creators, build community, and support each other’s creative projects.

A creative life can feel lonely, sharing work even more so. Release Day makes community a part of the creative process.

All of it leads to a single shared moment on Friday 29th May when creators around the world release their projects at the same time -a global fireworks display of creativity.

The only question is… what will you release?

Sign Up for Release Day

🎆 What kind of projects can you release?

Anything creative you’ve been working toward.

🧪 Purposeful experiments – the first draft, the unexpected new direction, the one-off project

📝 Small creations (with big hearts) – a new poem you’ve been itching to share, a DIY zine, a personal essay

🏗️ That big project – you know the one. You can’t stop tweaking it. Months or years have passed and you just can’t hit publish or feel confident enough to call it done.

The ideas that could unlock your next level serve no-one unreleased!

Check out the Release Day 2025 gallery for inspiration

RD25 GALLERY

Finally…

A quick note on the power of public experimentation.

The concept of Release Day had existed for about 9 months before I did anything with it. I kept saying I didn’t have enough time to make my big visison for it happen. I feared it not being received how I imagined. I was procrastinating, because of fear.

Last year, at around exactly this time, I had a conversation with a friend and told her about the idea. She said, ‘you HAVE to do that - it’s what the world needs right now’.

So, I thought… what if it was just an experiment? I set myself a two-week deadline to create the assets, copy, and webpage I needed to launch the most simple version of Release Day I could.

Two weeks later, on May 1st, I announced Release Day on this newsletter and the Creative Quests socials.

Four weeks later, FORTY people released their own creative projects into the world. Everything from personal essays, free diving courses, zines, games, and more.

A year later (right now!) Release Day is our most ambitious project and biggest partnership to date.

If you only ever create and experiment in private - you miss out on the generosity of the world that’s watching.

I can’t wait to see what you release on May 29th!

Quest love,
Sam x

🥾 Quester in Chief, CQ HQ
📲 @saaamfurness

the small print

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Sign up closes at 2pm BST on Tue March 31st
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Join April's Quest

Dear Questers,

Spring is here, the natural world is beginning to reveal its secrets - an invitation to lean into the most fundamental tool of discovery we possess.

We’ve arrived at the second stop on our Citizens of Curiosity journey and it’s time to explore the language of curiosity itself.

April’s Creative Quest theme is… QUESTION.

Question holds a kind of duality. It’s something we pose and something we do. To question is to probe, to doubt, to push against what we’re told is certain.

We ask questions in so many forms: through conversations that bring us closer to one another, games that test what we know, quizzes that measure and surprise us.

The right question can uncover open a new world. The brave question can reshape an old one. But what if we extended our questioning beyond words and into creative acts of all shapes?

Because questions are also things that move through us. Every question, from the small ones we brush past to the ones that linger… is a relationship with the unknown, and not all of them are asking to be answered. Imagine a day without a single question: no wondering, no doubting. What would be left?

This April, we’ll explore the art of inquiry in all its forms. We’ll interrogate assumptions, play with uncertainty, and discover that every Quest is built on questions - and every question, if followed with courage, becomes its own kind of Quest.

So bring your most pressing puzzles. Your half-formed wonderings. Your willingness to not-know.

Where might they lead you?

CQHQ ?

Last chance to sign up!

Our Quest programme is for you if you want to…

• Reclaim your attention and direct it with intention

• Slow down and wonder in a world obsessed with speed

• Play, create, and still care deeply about the world

• Practice a beginner’s mind and stretch your imagination

• Connect with curious humans across generations and geographies

• Find inspiration and belonging in the unknown

• Grow a creative practice that’s shared, not solitary

• Champion curiosity and creativity in your own community

  
  Quester Testimonials

  “Creative Quests manages to bottle up curiosity, playfulness and community magic to help you explore the creativity you didn’t know you had” - Annie, London

  “A kind, fun and transformative rollercoaster that takes you back to your innate creativity” - Sabine, Berlin

  “Quests always inspire me and open up the flood gates for new ideas. I’m more creative at work, I have more interesting conversations with friends, and I get to move through the world a little differently”. - Hannah, New York

Sign ups close for April’s Quest at 2:00pm GMT on Tue 31st March

✷ Come join 35 curious humans for a month where your creativity comes first.
✷ Our live workshops are on Tuesday’s at 6.00pm EST / 1.00pm EST (90 mins) 31 March, 7, 14, 21, 28 April

Inspiring workshops • Creative challenges • Community exchange.

If you can’t join us this time around, we will share our learnings and making on this newsletter throughout April.

But honestly - nothing beats the experience of Questing itself! If you are a teeny tiny bit curious… come join the adventure.

A month of QUESTIONING! awaits!

With love and questions,
Sam x
🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Share The Quest Digest by Creative Quests

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 Every year at this time of year; as the daffodils dance, magnolia bloom and cherry blossoms burst - I am reminded of a Japanese word.

‘Hanami’ (花見)

It’s a word that doesn’t exist is any other languages; quite literally translating as ‘Flower Viewing’, but more broadly meaning, ‘to enjoy the transient beauty of nature.’ I have been collecting untranslatable words for around ten years - and this is one of my favourites.

Over the next few weeks, Hanami season will sweep through Japan. People gathering to picnic, drink, and even karaoke under the cherry blossom (Sakura) for the sheer enjoyment of it’s fleeting arrival and departure.

It’s such a beautiful honouring of the temporary nature of, well, everything. With human life moving at ever increasing speeds, practices like Hanami are a way to change our relationship to time.

Slow down, pay attention and wonder - together!

It’s what we practice in our Quest programme - and we begin a new adventure on March 31st.

Meet your guide for April’s Quest: Clarence Kitt

Throughout 2026 we are exploring what it means to become a ‘Citizen of Curiosity’ Read more about our overarching purpose here:

Creative Quests: Hi Clarence 👋 Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your creative practices?

Clarence: I am a service designer, data artist and facilitator. I design for wonder and understanding. I work across creative languages to craft participatory experiences that invite people to see and feel ideas through multiple perspectives.

One concept I am particularly interested in reframing is data. Data is often perceived as clinical, emotionless, and invasive. Additionally, growing up in Hong Kong, I noticed a cultural belief that emotions and lived experiences carry less weight than statistical/empirical forms of knowledge.

My practice explores how both stories, feelings, and narratives can also function as meaningful data and that the data can take many shapes.

Sometimes it looks like a map, sometimes a series of portraits, sometimes a dinner table.

CQ: You dived into Questing for the first time last year and fully immersed yourself. What advice would you give to people who are curious about Questing?

Clarence: I’d say: untether yourself from any preconceived ideas of what you’ll make. My first Quest was about Maps, something I’ve explored a lot of before. While I felt super excited, I admit I also felt a pull to revisit unfinished projects and finally complete them. Instead, I chose to approach the theme as if I’m encountering Maps for the first time.

That changed a lot for me as the prompts and activities surfaced new ideas that I don’t believe I would’ve seen had I stayed attached to my past work.

Check out this amazing recount of Clarence’s debut Questing experience:

CQ: Could you share some of the things you created while Questing?

Clarence: For the theme of Maps, I was inspired by my breakout room conversations around things that guide us when we feel lost. Living away from my family, Chinese food is my way to stay connected to home. To express that feeling, I collaborated with a floral artist, Sylvia Cheng, (@growingtkaronto) to create a photo story showcasing landscapes made out of Chinese ingredients

For the theme of Letters, I went down a rabbit hole of exploring symbols and sigils. I designed my own emblem to represent good fortune by blending the letter ‘I’ and the Chinese character for jade, a symbol of luck and protection.

CQ: Who are your top 3 creativity heroes? What about them influences you?

Clarence:

Adolfo Arranz is a data and information visualizer whose work I grew up seeing in newspapers. I have vivid memories of feeling amazed how he’s able to make complex subjects feel so engaging. He showed me that the way something is presented can really transform how we connect to it.

Greta Gerwig plays a huge role in shaping my connection with storytelling and my relationship with myself. I first connected with her through the characters she played. It was powerful to feel seen in a way I hadn’t before. Following her journey into directing made me believe in the magic of connecting with people through story. I’m particularly drawn to the way she revisits familiar narratives and reinterprets them with different perspectives.

And I have to name my mom. I wouldn’t be who I am without spending so much time with all of her creative interests. She’s a painter, a florist, a chef, a baker and she’s always up for learning any creative new craft. Growing up, she’d stay up really late to help me finish a school project, take me to arts and craft stores. She shows me what’s possible if you’re just patient and sticking to the process.

CQ: If you were organising an IRL field trip for the readers of this newsletter - where would you take us?

Clarence: I’d take you all out to dinner! I love getting to know people through food, I’m fascinated just how much story can emerge through it. As part of the dinner, I’d organize a curiosity buffet. Each reader brings something that sparked their curiosity and that can be represented in a tactile form. We’d lay it all out like a table spread and that would become the night’s second menu.

CQ: Over 2026 we are exploring what it means to be a ‘Citizen of Curiosity’ in our programme (that you are facilitating!). What does that phrase mean to you?

Clarence: Over the years, I’ve often heard people say “I’m not creative” and that often makes me pause. I think creativity often is really tied to a lot of pressure, particularly with social media. There’s so much pressure for creativity to be original, understandable, viral to be valid. Creative Quests helped me remember a simpler core of creativity…to follow what feels warm and to explore what’s possible without needing a definitive outcome. I’m really excited to be able to be part of guiding the next Cohort, and I hope to create a space where people can lean into and tend to that instinct.

Creative Quests: Thank you Clarence! We can’t wait!

If you want to lead a more curiosity fuelled life, bring ambitious ideas to life, and make a difference in your community (just like Clarence!) we hope to see you in April.

Quest Sign Up

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off on Tuesday 31st March.
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
🥾 Quester in Chief, CQ HQ
📲 @saaamfurness

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 Some time over the Christmas period, in preparation for the arrival of my daughter - who at that time was an abstract concept - I read a quote about how parenthood affects your concept of time which really catapulted my heart.

It read: ‘the nights are long and the years are short’.

And it really turns out that this is more true than I could have ever imagined.

Not only have I blinked and suddenly have a divinely cherubic two month old - but somehow it’s been five weeks since our last Quest Digest.

It turns out that running a business, discovering a newborn, trying to maintain your own creative life, and telling about it at the same time is… a whole new way to navigate the limitations of time.

There is much inspiration to catch you up on.

Over the course of February we had 71 Questers (!) join us for our latest chapter of our Quest programme - this time, exploring the theme: IMAGINE.

Stop one on our year-long Citizens of Curiosity exploration.

We got pretty heavy into futures-dreaming and championing a world with curiosity at heart. A perfect platform for our next theme…

Join April's Quest

🧭 Here is a small sampler of what we discovered in our IMAGINE Quest - to inspire your own explorations.

✷ A practice: Design Fiction

Design Fiction bridges speculative design, science fiction, and technological development. It involves creating tangible, everyday objects that tell stories about potential near-future worlds.

It’s a physical, prototyped way of imagining that can be an incredibly compelling way to bring a future to life. And it doesn’t have to be high-tech.

Try it out:
• Spend 5-10 mins journalling or doodling on the kind of future you’d like to live in. Describe it in vivid detail.

• Take a sheet of paper and sketch or describe one of the following
- a household product
- a job role
- an item of clothing
- an event flyer

• Voila! You have created an artefact from the future.

✷ A question

What art or social movements from the past inspire you to imagine beyond the present?

✷ A quote

“Without imagination you live in a small room with the windows closed. Imagination opens the windows and shows us landscapes, horizons that we would not otherwise perceive.” — Maxine Greene, educational philosopher and social activist

Also special shout out to community member Alia Herman who wrote this in our Discord and I am still thinking about it:

“imagination is a substance that can’t survive in the real world unless it takes form through creativity.” — Alia Herman

✷ An oracle: Rob Hopkins

Rob became somewhat of an unofficial mascot for our exploration in February. His message of making alternative futures so delightfully irresistible and tangible, that we can’t resist bringing them to life, is our kind of change making.

He is the author of a few brilliant books on imagination such as ‘From What is to What If?’ and ‘How To Fall In Love With the Future’ and creator of such resources as the brilliant Imagination Sundial and Ministry of Imagination manifesto.

p.s - we are hosting a workshop with Rob next Monday 16th March - and you are invited! Get your ticket here.

✷ A mission: Future Walk

Step one: Imagine that you have time traveled to 2036 and your neighbourhood reflects the world you want to see.
Step two: Take a walk in your neighbourhood with this lens.
Step three: Imagine where and how your city has changed. What do you see, hear, smell, etc.
Step four: Where are you seeing signals of your imagined future in your present? Document and collect them.
Step five: Imagine the steps that lead from your present to the future you desire.

✷ A listen:

This episode of the - always on point - On Being podcast with Krista Tippet and Adrienne Maree-Brown delves into ways to the practice of Radical Imagination. I particularly loved the opening framing of ‘looking around the world for “live human signposts” — human beings who embody ways of seeing and becoming and who point the way forward to the world we want to inhabit'.’

Who is a human sign post in your life?

🎨 Community creations: Imagination edition

A Creative Quest is not just about exploring and learning - but making things too. We encourage small scrappy creative acts that express new ideas. Going beyond conversation and into creation help us understand our mutual theme in a more embodied way. Here are some things our Questers made in February.

Claire-Beth
Inspired by the mission of ‘taking a walk in 2036’, Claire-Beth created these collages from found words around her local town, which have been reimagined into future neighbourhood destinations. She imagined…

“Local Cake Pit Stops with healthy future cake free for everyone? Karaoke For Adventure, because singing in public is no longer embarrassing and it actually creates energy to power community infrastructure? Groups that fight the Zombie Sea Water with a new tactic of home-grown algaes fed from the collected crumbs off the kitchen floor? Community Pigeons For Everyone that deliver local messages because phones are now only used for long distance calls. Smile And Dream workshops once a month/quarterly in every road, where neighbours get together and share food and stories and learn from each other.”

Hannah
Following a group discussion about our favourite imagination-expanding characters from books of our childhoods… Hannah was curious about how she could characterise and make her imagination more tangible.

13 minutes, 29 pieces of gum, 6 googly eyes, and 1 sugar rush later…

Sam (that’s me!)
Imagined a future where public spaces are more conducive to curiosity, connection and play. After noticing that notice boards & bill boards in pubic spaces are only designed for information and consumption, I imagined a future where our streets are filled with provocations. So I came up with, printed, and wheat-pasted conversation prompts on empty commercial spaces around the town I live in.

Melanie
With a head for learning design and a heart for community - Melanie imagined a future where our education system has been transformed, opening up young people to a whole range of new subjects that prepare them for being more creative, caring citizens. So, she designed a new curriculum! I’m hoping my daughter steps into school like this one in the future.

Emma
After learning the practice of Design Fiction, Emma imagined what an all new job role might look like for the kind of future she wants to live in - then created an ad for it.

Does working in the ‘Department of Regeneration and Shared Life’ as a ‘Neighbourhood Lingering Steward’ sound like your dream role? Well, mark your calendars - applications are open in the year 2038!

This really just scratches the surface of the kind of places people get to in our Quest programme.

It’s playfully profound. Wildly communal. And we believe it’s what the world needs.

If you want to learn how to see the world differently, make stuff and Quest with a crew other curious folks from around the world:

Join our next Quest in April!

One month. One theme. Endless inspiration.

Live session times & dates:
Tuesday 31 March, 7, 14, 21, 28 April
6.00pm - 7.30pm BST / 1.00pm - 2.30pm EST
+ a weekly host of creative missions and community connection

£55 standard tier / £30 concessions
Use code: QUESTDIGEST for 10% off standard tier at checkout

Join April's Quest

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, here is how you can support us or get involved:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off on 31st March
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
Quester in chief

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Dear Questers,

A new year is stretching its limbs. Futures hover half-formed at the edges of our vision. And as we take our first collective steps as Citizens of Curiosity, there is one fuel we cannot proceed without.

February’s Creative Quest theme is… IMAGINE.

Imagination is often mistaken for decoration.

It’s seen as naive, frivolous, a childish indulgence.

But imagination is not ornamental - it is structural; the invisible architecture beneath everything we inhabit.

Before a building is built, it is imagined.
Before an ideology takes hold, it is imagined.
Before a movement gathers momentum, a border dissolves, or a future is resisted or reclaimed - someone, somewhere, imagines.

This month, we turn our attention the creative potential of what could be.

From sensing the present world, and venturing beyond into the speculative, the possible, the not-yet.

Through gathering, exchange and play; we’ll wander through imagined worlds past and present - artistic movements, social revolutions, radical ideas, playful futures - noticing how they were dreamed into being, who was allowed to imagine them, and what they changed once they became real.

This February, we invite you to loosen the grip on the given.

To try on new lenses. New roles. New possibilities. And ask the most powerful question we have:

Imagine if…?

Pack lightly. Bring curiosity. Leave room for possibility.

Proceed with unbound imagination.

CQHQ 💭

Each Quest we invite a special guest to share their passionate wisdom with us… and we are over the moon to announce that our Guest Quester in Febryary, leading a special workshop for us on Feb 17th, is imagination catalyst, time traveler and author of ‘How to Fall in Love with the Future: a time traveller’s guide to changing the world’, Rob Hopkins!

We have a limited amount of extra tickets available for Rob’s workshop here.

Sign ups close for Feb’s Quest at 2:00pm GMT on Tue 3rd Feb.

✷ Come join 65 curious humans for a month where your creativity comes first.
✷ Our live workshops are on Tuesday’s at 6.00pm GMT/ 1.00pm EST (90 mins) 3, 10, 17, 22 Feb + 3 Mar

Inspiring workshops • Creative challenges • Community exchange.

Join Feb's Quest

A month of playful discovery awaits!

Quest love
Sam x
🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Share The Quest Digest by Creative Quests

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 Coming at you with a new, regular feature called ‘The World We Want to Live In’. An evolving moodboard of noticings that signal toward the kind of curiosity-fuelled, connection-rich, creative future we’re Questing for.

Also a reminder:
Our first Creative Quest of the year starts in TEN DAYS!

🗓️ Feb 3rd - Mar 3rd
We will guide you through our original Quest process via:

👁️‍🗨️ A curiosity expanding theme​
⚡️ x5 90 min virtual workshops ft guests
💭 ‘Campfire’ chats with fellow Questers
💌 Inspiring creative missions to inspire real world exploration
🌐 Collective imagination resources & virtual community
📍 City meet-ups with other Questers

Join February's Quest

Over our Quest programme this year we are exploring what it means to become a ‘Citizen of Curiosity’.

At the heart of this is a set of lived questions:

• How might we become more curious citizens - creating rituals and structures that support conscious exploration, learning and discovery in everyday life?

• If Curiosity were a place, what would it mean to belong there? What might our cities, towns and neighbourhoods look like if creativity, curiosity and connection were treated as measures of a healthy planet?

We don’t know exactly what this means, yet. But through creative exploration, community exchange and well, Questing - we know we will get closer.

For the last couple of months a small group of us have been keeping tabs on whenever we’ve seen something in the world that feels like the Creative Quests flavour of changemaking. Things that signal ‘Citizens of Curiosity’ to us and the world we will be building and guiding toward throughout 2026.

Here is a little selection from our moodboard so far. We’re going to be adding to this list though out the entire year of Questing and sharing our inspiration with you as we go.

🌍 ✨ The World We Want to Live In

an evolving ‘Citizens of Curiosity’ moodboard

1. Design Roles for a shifting world

Couldn’t love this piece by more. It so perfectly illustrates this crossroad we are at. The old roles and vocabulary no longer serve us. Too rigid. Too boring. Too soulless. Too CV (or resumé if you aren’t from the UK).

The roles we can step into as creative humans are so much more expansive than ‘Facilitator’, ‘Designer’, ‘Producer’, ‘Director’.

The kind of future we are Questing for needs new language - to encapsulate the joyful, imaginative spirit we wish the world to exude and the roles we can play in it.

DesignShifts

DesignShifters: New Design Roles For a Shifting World

Explore a visual version of the archetypes…

Read more

7 months ago · 67 likes · 2 comments · Ida Persson

2. Imagination provocations in our streets

Imagine that when you left your house, to go to the supermarket, or meet a friend, that along the way you weren’t bombarded with information and ads or went straight to your phone to kill the time - but instead were met with a series of questions, public experiments and invitations to explore.

Things that make you stop and say… what? Beautifully sticky ideas that plant a seed in your mind, ready to germinate in all the conversations and other exchanges you have that day, week, month, year… or life!

3. Craftivism

A term coined by artist Betsy Greer, who defines a ‘craftivist’ as anyone who uses their craft to help the greater good.

“Craftivism is about raising consciousness, creating a better world through creative acts of making … sharing ideas with others in a way that is welcoming, not dividing, and celebrating traditional skills in new ways.

How might we develop our own creative practice (or explore new ones) while giving back to the communities we are a part of?

4. Intergen is the new gen

One question we get asked repeatedly is: ‘who is Creative Quests for?’.

There is a very much written ‘rule’ that any business or project with hopes of scaling, that you cannot be ‘for everyone’. It’s true. But not in the way that many define.

Demographics are outdated, marketing lingo, ways to categorize people. Age, race, gender, location etc. A demographic assumes a lot.

We prefer instead to think of psychographics: classifying people according to their attitudes and aspirations.

Creative Quests is for anybody… who has a willingness to radically and playfully explore their curiosity.

Our intergenerational Quester crew is one of the best bits of our community!

Read the op-ed from Daybreaker founder Radha Agrawal on intergenerational belonging right here.

5. In robot times: the task is to become more human

We will not be optimised out of existence. We will not let automation steal the joy of exploration, scenic routes, trying, failing, trying again and real world connection from us.

Don’t forget: experience is the whole point.

If this moodboard feels like a world you want to live and create in too - come build it with us!

You can join us for:
One month-long Quest: £55
Year-long 2026 Quest pass (x4 Quests): £160

Quest Sign Up

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off on 3rd Feb.
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 I hope that 2026 is off to positive start. Whether that means calmly wintering your way through till February, or coming in hot with resolutions and creative project kick-offs.

For me, January 2026 is about stepping into new roles.

Last week I shared the story of my ten year Questiversary and the imminent birth of my first child about to meet in spacetime. Thank you for showing SO much love to the video I released.

This 10 year moment has really felt like crossing a threshold; where I’m looking much more expansively to all the possibilities of what a more creative future could look like and being seriously ambitious about the role Creative Quests can play in it.

And I really do owe it to the future… because I’m a Dad to a daughter now.

She is most beautiful thing I have ever seen and I can’t wait to experience what life is like through the imagination of a kid of your own. A whole new Quest. The biggest yet!

We named her Seren, as we hope her life is filled with serendipity and all the wonder it brings.

What comes with stepping into new roles, is letting go of others.

And this week I am DELIGHTED, to introduce you to a new Quest Guide of our flagship programme (kicking off in Feb!) who I will be handing over the facilitation reigns to.

A chance for some new energy to evolve our programme - while I take on more of a support & curation role and continue to lead the way on some other extremely exciting Creative Quests projects in the works.

Meet your host for February’s Quest: Sparks ⚡️

Join February's Quest

Anyone that has been in our creative community or joined a Quest in the last five years will almost certainly have encountered the brilliance of Sparks before.

An OG Quester (joining our pilot series in 2021), Sparks has been a constant source of boundless ideas, get-shit-done energy and wild playfulness from the start. They are Quester through and through.

I could think of NO better human to be handing over the Quest Guide reins too. Especially as we enter into this new Citizens of Curiosity season - where throughout 2026 we will be navigating how boldly exploring our curiosity can make change in our worlds.

Read more on our 2026 programme here:

Now lets meet the one and only… Sparks ⚡️

Creative Quests: Hi Sparks! For those who haven’t encountered you yet.. could you introduce yourself?

Sparks: Hi! I’m Sparks (they/them). I’m a queer, solarpunk experience designer based in Portland, OR (USA). I craft delightfully unexpected experiences that leverage wonder, play and collective imagination to provoke systemic change. I’m also in the circus.

CQ: You have done pretty much every Quest to date! What are some of your favourite past Quest themes and what did you learn from the exploration?

Sparks:

1. POETRY: Find your people, find yourself

The OG Poetry Quest, January 2021, will always hold a special place in my heart. Through it, I found my people, my voice and my favorite color (yellow)! Poetry Quest also inspired my first collaboration with another Quester, Channel: Poetry, a curated, multi-sensory poetry experience that traveled the globe in an unassuming box.

2. COLOR: Sometimes not knowing is the point

I don’t think I’ll ever enjoy soup as much as I did in our Color Quest, the catalyst for The Great Souperbowl of 2021, where I accidentally initiated a viral What’s App thread in the Quester community with a good ol’ fashion game of “guess that soup”, which, 500+ messages later, obviously led to a Souperbowl awards ceremony. (I don’t have an easy link for this one, but if you’re up for going on a lil Quest journey, you too can see what the soup hype was all about.)

3. COLLAGE: Slow down to change your perspective

When the theme dropped for Collage Quest, I was, cómo se dice, unenthused. I had always thought of collage as a tacky arts and crafts medium and felt uninspired to spend a month gluing together magazine clippings. But, and this is what I love so much about the Quest life, by saying yes to exploring with an open mind something I had so many built up biases against, I was able to see with fresh eyes a whole new side of the art form. To this day, collage remains one of my favorite methods for slowing down. I find the process quite meditative actually. And out from a quest I had zero expectations for came Tarollage, surprise custom tarot-inspired collages I made and sent to strangers across the globe.

4. TIME: It’s worth losing yourself in the process

Time Quest brought out my mad scientist vibes. I learned A LOT about geodomes and constructed 3 of them out of cardboard in my living room. I had some BIG dreams for experiences I wanted to create for time Quest, which ultimately never manifested. But that wasn’t the point. The point was the process. Construction and deconstruction, and everything I learned along the way.

CQ: Who are your top 3 creativity heroes?

Sparks:

• Es Devlin (set designer)

• Marina Abramović (performance artist)

• Rob Hopkins (imagination activist)

CQ: What does a 10/10 creative day for Sparks look like?

Sparks:

🏕️ Wake up in a quirky lil treehouse, nestled away in the woods somewhere, birds chirping, moss on the windows, a river babbling in the distance

☕️ Make some tea and curl up near a window with a blankie and an inspired book

🙆‍♀️ Strrrrettttttchhhhhhh

🐾 Go for a wonder walk in the woods, find the sun, befriend a troll, forage some tasty snacks

💭 Wander back to my tree and get deliciously lost in the flow of a creative project, whiteboards full, post it notes everywhere, lose all sense of time and place

🥗 Make and savor a colorful meal (and maybe a surprising dessert!)

🤸 Turn on some jams and dance around the kitchen in my mismatched socks

🎨 Make some art, just for me

🛀 Take a slow bath, exhale

🌠 Curl up in bed with a bunch of pillows, a view of the stars in the night sky, the soundscape of the woods at night and a most beloved chai goose (my cat)

✨ Replay all the wonders from my day as I drift peacefully off to dreamland

CQ: Over 2026 we are exploring what it means to be a ‘Citizen of Curiosity’ in our programme (that you are facilitating!). What does that phrase mean to you?

Sparks: A Citizen of Curiosity is someone who actively chooses to pursue a curious life.

Typically, “Citizen of” precedes a place, usually a birthplace or where one lives. But when we replace something tangible and known, like a place, with something intangible and unknown, like curiosity, something magical happens—we open ourselves, our lives, up to possibility. Suddenly being a citizen is not as binary (or boring) as simply having rights based on where you were born, but an opportunity to transform that place, or any place, into what could be.

Unlike other types of citizenships, there are no prerequisites to becoming a Citizen of Curiosity. If you have access to curiosity, you are eligible. In this way, anyone can be a Citizen of Curiosity, because curiosity is a free and abundant resource, available to all of us at all times. To be a Citizen of Curiosity is to choose to live with curiosity as your guide.

Just imagine what this world would look like if everyone chose to be a Citizen of Curiosity

CQ: What creative pursuits do you have on for 2026?

Sparks: 2026 is stirring up to be quite the year! My current pursuits are a healthy balance of creativity, changemaking and circus, and I’m not mad about it.

• Creative Quests (!) - I’m excited to play a bigger role in Creative Quests this year, supporting our, now official, Quest daddy, Sam Furness, who just became an actual daddy for the first time!!! And boy oh boy, do we have some other exciting ventures in the works for CQ2026!

• TOSS - I’m performing partner acrobatics and trapeze with a circus troupe in Portland at the end of March!

• SPLITWEATHER - The climate adventure series I’ve been working on with my collaborator for the last year and a half is finally coming to life! We design adventures inspired by biomimicry--real examples of resilience, adaptation, and efficiency in nature. We nerd out about how ants optimize paths, how trees communicate and how mycelium networks share resources. And then we design experiential challenges for humans inspired by them. We just secured a venue and are running our first ever playtests of the experience in summer of 2026!

• Landfall Labs - I’m one of the founding fellows of Landfall Labs, a research fellowship made up of experience designers who design for social impact, and we are kicking off our first year together, with the intention of securing funding to do big things in the experiential changemaking space.

• QURC - I founded a queer underground rebel circus (QURC) last summer with the intention of using circus as a medium for local activism and this year we are planning our debut street style performance activations.

• The Living Table - I just co-facilitated a 5 course experiential dinner for a bunch of creative generalists who share a passion for changemaking, which ended with an invitation to join as a cohort, gathering monthly for a year to support each other in our creative pursuits.

• Village Building Convergence - VBC is an annual collaboration and cross pollination of neighbors, groups, and civic partnerships to transform our city spaces into vibrant, inclusive, and sustainable neighborhoods. I am collaborating on a futures dreaming workshop for the VBC this year that will inspire Portlanders to imagine (and actualize!) a better future for our city.

Creative Quests: Thank you Sparks 💛

As you can see… an exceptional, kind, creative human being!

If you want to lead a more curiosity fuelled life, bring ambitious ideas to life, and make a difference in your community (just like Sparks!) we hope to see you in February for our Citizens of Curiosity kick-off.

One month-long Quest: £55
Year-long 2026 Quest pass (x4 Quests): £160

Quest Sign Up

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Join a Quest! A month-long theme immersion joined by curious humans around the world. Our next Quest kicks off on 3rd Feb.
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Our new Creative Quests programme ‘Citizens of Curiosity’ kicks off 3rd Feb!

Spend a month immersing your curiosity in world changing theme alongside a global crew.

Reclaim your attention ✷ Turn the world into your playground ✷ Make & release creative projects

Find Out More!

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋

This weekend I celebrated 10 years of Questing.

On 4th of January 2016 I made a pledge to reclaim my creativity from the conveyor belt of adulthood.

My inspiration was depleted, curiosity on auto pilot. I wanted to hit unsubscribe on the idea that I was going to follow where life was naturally taking me.

I knew that life could be more adventurous and playful.

So I sat in a coffee shop in Brixton, South London with my notebook and wrote 59 words that have changed the course of my life ever since.

If this idea seems familiar - it’s because this is what later became Creative Quests (although it would take another 5 years to get to that point).

Everything I ever wanted my creative life to be, came from surrendering what I thought my creativity was. I stopped assuming and started being determinedly curious about new things.

Now, ten years on from that pivotal day, I’ve explored 31 themes - and thousands around the world have joined me.

🍿 Watch this video to hear the 10 year story in 3 minutes!

‘Unfolding’
A letter to my creative self in January 2016
Written on 04.01.26

Sammy,

This is a letter for you, 10 years on from a day that will be a significant part of your life. Although in some small way, I think you already know this.

Putting pen to paper on that day and writing out your 12x16 mission statement felt like answering a call from something beyond. A call to creativity so strong it was as if there was a shimmering energy under your skin - waiting for permission to release.

Soon, that creative part of yourself won’t feel like it’s waiting in the wings anymore. It will be centre stage.

I want you to know that this decision will change all aspects of your life in ways is unimaginable to you right now.

What will begin as immersing your curiosity in 12 themes over a year will become a blueprint for how you live your life. A practice that will heal you, hold you, and guide you through the many seasons to come.

The desire, or “the urge“ as Grandpa calls it, to explore your creativity will persist in you; evolving and shifting, but always a constant Northstar.

Your themed explorations even have a name now: Quests. A bit catchier than ‘my monthly projects’ don’t you think?

In 2026 your Quests look a little different (more on that later!) but they still carry the same spark you lit in 2016, a simple question:

“What could open up if I stopped believing the stories I tell myself about what I’m interested in or good at creatively?”

I don’t think you realise how potent this question is. Or maybe you do. I can’t quite remember.

This spirit of openness will launch you into the lives and passions of others. You will see the world through the eyes of storytellers, poets, animators, map-makers, conservationists, pilots, swimmers, magicians, scientists and so many more.

Every new theme - will reshape your perspective of what creativity is and how you understand yourself.

On this tenth Questiversary, you are up to 31 Quests and there isn’t a theme you haven’t found value in yet. Each exploration will show you a version of the world that was previously invisible.

You will make new friends across generations and geographies. You’ll have ideas that are shared across the globe and co-author a book on Questing alongside your very own community.

Seriously! People around the world will call themselves Questers. How insane is that? And I have other news for you…

There are some folks who have been Questing alongside you for five years now.

Let me also say - that it’s not all highs.

That sadness you feel, it will re-emerge at points. You will feel like you are back at the start. You will feel like an imposter. You will feel like this project should be further along than it is.

But you are older and wiser now and realise something very important…

A creative life is not really about big impressive projects that get the loudest applause.

The hardest thing of all is to be consistent in your practice – and build a life where you have the freedom to live and express yourself creatively in a way that works for the kind of life you want.

With this, a brilliant irony will emerge.

You hoped your challenge would help you find a new and singular passion. Pick and mix different themes until you found a creative match.

It may sound disappointing to know that this will not happen. What will happen is that the Questing process itself will become your practice.

The craft you will sharpen is a way of being. The art of being malleable, learning and unlearning, seeing the world as your playground.

In 2026 you have no idea how valuable this will be.

Questing is no longer only a way to stay creative, but a way to stay human.

Things have gotten busier, faster, weirder (bad weird), more automated. People are overwhelmed. People are lonely. People are disconnected.

And they’re seeking what Questing offers: clarity in the noise, human connection, playfulness, unexpected possibilities, different ways to orient yourself in the world.

What can I say? You were a decade ahead of your time!

All of these things will happen because you let go with some assumptions about yourself.

Thank you for this act of bravery.

So you probably want to know… what am I doing today to celebrate 10 years of Quests?

Well, the universe has delivered a big (little) gift.

Your first child… arriving this week. Today, you and the love of your life will make a commitment to parenthood; a whole new Quest to begin. January is a time for birth and re-birth.

You are in a very different season of life now, with another about to start. And I could do with some of that 20216 bravery right now. I’m on the edge of the greatest unknown yet. What it means for living a creative life, I don’t know. I’m nervous about it. But there is surely nothing more creative that nurturing a life.

You showed me that the unknown is the ultimate playground. So let’s play.

Thank you for beginning the journey.

As for the next 10 years - I got it from here.

To infinity and beyond

Sam.
04.01.2026

Sustaining a creative project for 10 years…

Ten years and 31 themes sounds like an impressive number when bundled up into one.

But I think it’s interesting to see what that actually looks like over time and how the themes & rhythms have evolved.

Any long term creative practice will have its high seasons and low seasons.

It’s hard to have that perspective when you’re in it.

There have been periods of intensity. Periods of pause and reflection. Some moments of going quietly insane with the amount of pressure I’ve put on myself to succeed.

2018-2020 was a particularly hard time where I wondered if really it was just a project I did in 2016 and I should move on.

I am so glad I persisted!!

KEEP SWIMMING! 🏊‍♀️

Finally

That’s all for this week. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Joining our flagship Quest programme! Our next themed adventure kicks off on 3rd Feb.
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

👁 Follow us on Instagram

Welcome to the new era of Questing.
Where exploring your creativity is world changing.

Dear Questers,

Happy New Year!

We’re writing with an invitation.

It’s for those who believe that human creativity, playful curiosity and deep connection are at the heart of our collective future.

On February 3rd 2026, we kick off our flagship global Quest programme. Each Quest brings together an international, intergenerational group of curious, creative humans who commit to immersing themselves in a shared theme for one calendar month.

We’re doing things a little differently in 2026.

Sign-ups are now open for our February Quest, beginning February 3rd 2026 (full details later in newsletter) .

You can also buy a year-pass for all four Quests in 2026.

Citizens of Curiosity

In 2026, our global programme will be guided by an overarching purpose: Citizens of Curiosity.

We’re imagining this year like a big old road trip - one where we really get to the heart of what it means to live, create and participate as a Citizen of Curiosity. It’s going to be fun, imaginative, experimental and purposeful.

What is a Citizen of Curiosity exactly?

It’s a phrase we’ve been sitting with. A way of naming what we’ve been noticing in the world: a need, a desire, an invitation to explore.

Something that counters the doomy vibes, the disconnection, the endless distraction. Another future is possible - we know because we’ve experienced it.

Over the past five years, through our global Quest programme we’ve experienced the quiet power of shared curiosity. Theme after theme, we’ve watched people soften their certainty, stretch their imaginations, embrace playfulness, take creative risks, and begin to see their worlds differently.

We’ve learned that when curiosity is collective - when it’s given time, structure and permission - it becomes more than a personal trait. It becomes a force that feeds back into every corner of our lives.

Curiosity is the fuel for a more creative, connected way of living.

Curiosity is a place to belong.

Join a Quest in 2026

💭 We imagine a future where…

• Creativity is flourishing - and infrastructure exists to nurture curiosity rather than steal our attention.

• Creative life feel less isolated and more intertwined with one another.

• Play is seen as a lifelong human right.

• More ideas make it out of people’s hearts and into the world, where others can experience them.

We know a more playful way is possible.

To move toward this future, we need Citizens of Curiosity (and Questers are PERFECT candidates): people willing to step out of their bubbles, explore their worlds creatively, and experiment their way toward new perspectives, pathways and ways of living.

🙋 We’re seeking people who want to:

• Grow a shared community of creative practice

• Reclaim their attention and direct it with care

• Play, have fun, and care deeply about the world at the same time

• Slow down and wonder in a society obsessed with efficiency

• Practice a beginner’s mind and nurture their imagination

• Connect with curious humans across generations and geographies

• Experience the unknown as a generative place for inspiration and connection

• Be an advocate for creativity and curiosity in their own communities

• Make 2026 their most creative year yet

  
  

  Sound like you? Join us!

A year of explorations

Throughout 2026, we’ll continue our quarterly Quest rhythm:

🧭 February, April and October
Three curated global Quests, each shaped by a mystery theme (revealed only after sign-up closes). No matter the theme, you can always expect to be making things, going on real-world missions, learning from inspiring guests and forming friendships with fellow Questers around the world.

💭 July
A different invitation - where you’ll be guided to design your own Quest, following your personal curiosity.

You can now choose how you’d like to join us:

→ Join the February Quest (starting Feb 3)
→ Get the 2026 Citizens of Curiosity Pass (all four Quests, discounted)

Join a Quest

February Quest: what’s included

🧭 A curiosity-expanding theme to explore, supported by a rich creative playground:

⚡️ Five live virtual workshops with guest contributors
(all sessions recorded and easy to access)

📅 3, 10, 17, 24 Feb & 3 March
⏰ 6.00–7.30pm GMT / 1.00–2.30pm EST

🏕️ Weekly campfire chats
Connection focused hours of conversation around our Quest theme.

💌 Weekly creative missions
A new pack of challenges drops each week, guiding you to explore, notice and create in fresh ways.

📖 A communal journal
A shared space to reflect, document discoveries and weave your experience together with others.

All for £55

Your curiosity is an adventure waiting to happen.

👉 Join us at creativequests.world

Finally…

4th January will mark Ten years of my Questing journey. And Five years since we hosted the first ever collective Quest.

It looks like we’re working in chapters of five.

As always we never quite know where the journey of the next five years will end up - but we trust that curiosity with show us the way.

May this year be the most creative yet,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

the small print

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Please fill out the Quest Digest reader survey:

We are looking to expand the offering our newsletter + Creative Quests platform in 2026. We want to build a better home for people looking to live a curiosity fuelled, creative life.

Please take our reader survey (4 mins)

Take our reader survey

Seasons Greetings Questers,

Sam here 👋 I hope you’re sitting comfortably - or restlessly - in this suspended, stretchy final week of the year.

I hesitated before sending another year-end wrap-up to add to people’s inboxes. But I decided that the progress we’ve made with Creative Quests this year deserves celebrating - always in the hope that it sparks some courage in you (yes, you!) to take a risk, try something new, and commit to exploring the unknown.

Side note: I feel like the unknown needs a rebrand. It’s the only place where new things happen. Imagine if the unknown was renamed “the possible” - how differently we’d treat it, approach it, and play within it.

It’s feeling distinctly like change is in the air. Not the fractional kind either, more of the tectonic sort. Are you feeling it too?

2024 was our year of imagination.

We took the risk of pausing almost every public programme to give ourselves space for emergence. We planted many seeds and worked quietly. It felt like walking through an infinite mist, trusting we’d eventually find our way. It was a rough - but necessary year. If you are currently in this mist… keep going.

✷

2025 needed to bear fruit.

Even if only a small, wonky-shaped first crop.

I’m thankful to say that we experienced a year of creative abundance (financially… we’re still working on it!). I’ll share more about the new ways we supported people to Quest later in this email. Looking back now, 2025 has been our year of possibility - and it’s taken a village ❤️

✷

2026? Well… it’s kicking off pretty strong, let me tell you that.

The first week of the new year will see two big milestones in my life beautifully collide in space-time: my 10-year Questiversary and the birth of my first child. The power of this moment is alive in me. It’s otherworldly.

I’ll save my deeper feelings on this for another letter - but I can honestly say I haven’t felt the plates shifting beneath me this much since 10 years ago, when I was plotting my debut year of Questing in 2016.

Our global Quest programme will return in 2026
… and we’re doing things a little differently.

Sign-up opens on 2nd January, and our first Quest begins on 3rd February.

2025: a year of expanding the possibilities of what Creative Quests can be.

I don’t think I’ve ever said this publicly, but I envision a not-so-distant future where Creative Quests is a top-of-mind place for creative exploration and for living a curiosity-fuelled life. We need creativity and curiosity flowing through every corner of our lives - I’ve never been more sure of that.

In 2024, we realised that for this to be true, we needed to offer many more ways for people to explore their creativity with us. In 2025, we began prototyping and launching some of these new ways to play.

• Sculpture (January)

• Maps (April)

• Letters (October)

Each theme unlocked new ways of seeing alongside 150 Questers. This year, I feel we really established the role our programme plays within our growing ecosystem: an intergenerational, international playground for artful experiments, creative hunches, and wild ideas.

A 24-hour global celebration where creative people collectively release their work.

Our pilot run was about as scrappy as it gets - and yet 40+ creative projects were released into the world in a single day.

Release Day will return in 2026, so if you’re working on something - or planning to begin - stay tuned.

Check out 2025's releases

We followed a hunch that our growing archive of themes held the keys to new ways of Questing. As a result, 30+ community members came together to research, write, design, and publish The Quester’s Guide (Issue One: Magic).

Get your copy here

We were invited to bring the Quest life to two major UK music and arts festivals, transforming these sites into places of creative connection and play. Check out the recap video made by Amy Harrison-Moakes.

Where shall we play in 2026?

We brought the Quest life into local neighbourhoods - with more IRL adventures to come.

Huge thanks to Hannah Singleman and Jillian Lenser for hosting our NYC events.

Thank you to all our community and supporters in 2025.

We really believe in the power that creativity and curioisty have to make our world a more connected, inspiring and fun place to be.

None of what we do is possible without people who think the same!

We hope you have an amazing end of 2025. We’ll see you for more explorations in 2026.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 It’s been a whirlwind two weeks since our debut book, The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic), was released into the world.

After countless trips to the post office, fulfilling hundreds of orders and sending books to 20 (!) countries, this is all feeling very real.

Order The Quester's Guide

Virtual book launch
Tue 18 Nov @ 6-7pm GMT / 1-2pm EST
RSVP: https://luma.com/my4fx70t

We are hosting a free virtual event to mark the release of The Quester’s Guide. Featuring:
✷ a look into the process of making the book
✷ stories from contributors
✷ magic activities!

Join the book launch

😵‍💫 Strive to 😌 Arrive

As creative people, I feel there’s a tendency to always be in what I’m calling “strive mode.”

Striving for the next opportunity. Striving for the next idea. Striving for the contract that eases the financial stresses limiting our creative capacities (this one is particularly real).

The feeling of striving is an embodied one - with a palpable energy. An addictive cocktail of stress and ambition that can burn us out and fuel us at the same time.

It can be so persistent, especially if you’re building a creative career, that you can miss the moments you actually arrived in - the very moments you’d been striving for.

Self-publishing and distributing a co-authored, co-designed book is no small feat.

When I say we collectively had no idea what we were doing, I mean we had no idea. I say this proudly because we persisted through the uncertainty and created something I genuinely believe is a unique publication for creative exploration.

In next week’s issue, I’ll be breaking down how we made The Quester’s Guide - and you’ll see how we kept playing and experimenting until the patterns emerged and it all came together.

In any process where you are navigating many unknowns - this only adds to the persistence of “strive mode,” because it’s up to you to notice and honour the milestones along that misty path.

At our London book launch, a dear friend of mine (and of Creative Quests), Tiu De Haan, put her hand on my shoulder - clearly seeing “the strive” emanating from me like heat on a frosty morning - and said something to the effect of: “Dude: this is your book launch. Take a look around - be here, feel it!”

We did a little shake-out, I actually took the sights and sounds of the room in - and I felt myself shift down a gear.

It was the reminder I needed, in the midst of all the busyness, that we had arrived in a moment that was once entirely imaginary. A speculative future was now very real, and I’d be a fool to miss it by letting “strive mode” take over.

So today I just want to share some of these moments of arrival with you - because they really are worthy of pause and celebration.

Launch events

We gathered community and friends in Margate and London to see the The Quester’s Guide into the world. In true CQ fashion, we remixed the standard ‘author reads section of book + Q&A’ format and opted for something a little more interactive.

Hidden around the two venues were prompt cards from our new deck the Pathways of Magic - and attendees had to seek out certain cards and fulfil creative missions throughout the night.

It was also a chance to gather a handful of the MANY contributors to this issue. We managed a group shot with 6 out of 30 of us and I am taking this as a win!

—

Our first stockists!

Two brilliant independent shops in Margate: Asobi Store and On a Whim.

In any creative process where you are dealing with unknowns, you are doing something for the first time, or have no template to follow - it is essential that you have something to anchor your imagination to. An imaginary fixed point on the horizon which can act as the beacon you are aiming for.

For The Quester’s Guide, my anchor was visualising the book on the shelves of two shops in the town where I live. On days where where me, Ana Grigorovici , ✷ Mariam Bagersh, Gemma Purkiss, Mikayla Humphries, The Highest Finca & Morgan Duta were trying to figure out design choices, working on the cover or just finding the next piece of the puzzle - I would literally go and walk past these shops and imagine our book there. Every time I did this I came back to the work feeling more motivated and clearer on the next steps.

Last week I didn’t need to imagine our books on these shelves any longer!

It was only natural that these places to be our first stockists. If you’re in Margate - go check out these amazing independent shops.

If not: order a copy online via

Your copies arriving!

Wishing these little books and card decks good luck at the post office and sending them off to be packed on planes, trains and automobiles on their way to new homes, felt both exhilarating and deeply irresponsible.

Letting these little book children of ours travel unattended around the globe, cloaked from the harsh realities of the world in only a padded envelope?! Scary stuff.

I soon got over my guilty parent feeling as I saw the photos start popping of the books and cards in your hands, on your book shelves and even out for a stroll to see the sights of New York!!

This book was made for exploring.

Knowing that copy which lands on a doorstep is about to set a creative adventure in motion is an amazing feeling! Even more so knowing that you are reading stories, fulfilling missions and seeing designs made by our community!

Thank you sharing in these moments of arrival!

If you’ve got your copy, I know myself and the other 29 makers of this book and card deck would love to hear your thoughts.

Leave a comment

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Our Quest programme is wrapped for 2025. But 2026 plans are coming soon - express your interest here.
✷ Buy our book & card deck: The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 Today is really a very good day. A joyous day in fact!

A year since we launched our successful Kickstarter campaign, and hundreds of hours of work later… our debut release is here.

It’s been co-created, start to finish, by 30+ members of our community - and I couldn’t be prouder of what we’ve made.

This isn’t just about releasing a book, it’s introducing a whole new way to Quest - the first in a series - which we hope will fuel many more creative adventures far into the future.

Going to be transparent with y’all… this is one of those moments where we need your help in sharing the message. If you’ve been following our journey, you’ll know that this book is 10 years in the making.

So, introducing…

The Quester’s Guide (Issue 01: Magic)

Available to pre-order now on Metalabel
Releasing on 31st October 2025

The Quester’s Guide (Magic issue) is an interactive journey of ideas, activities and stories designed to make you see the world differently and turn the world into a creative playground. Explore through our book, a virtual platform of collective research, and a deck of prompt cards.

Order our book!

About this release

In January 2024, 60 Questers from around the world spent 30 days immersing their creative curiosity in Magic. This issue of The Quester’s Guide shares our most compelling discoveries, the revelations that followed and invites you to explore them with us. Every insight, story, and creation comes from community members and friends we’ve met along the way.

This isn’t a book about magic tricks. It’s about ancestry, nature, serendipity, imagination, intention and realms far beyond…

📒 About the book (The Quester’s Guide)
An interactive, guided journey over 112 pages to help you see with fresh eyes, play imaginatively, and reconnect with your creative spirit. You’ll find 40+ beautifully illustrated missions, creative prompts, and illuminating perspectives on Magic and Creativity from artists, thinkers, creatives, and fellow Questers from around the world.

🎴 About the card deck (Pathways of Magic)
Shuffle through 30 magic-themed prompts, perfect for daily insight, creative inspiration, or provoking ideas. There are five themes to explore (Noticing, Moving, Returning, Imagining, and Making), with each theme containing five prompts (Questions, Practices, Instructions, Quotes, and Oracles.) Pull a card intuitively, choose a specific theme, or create interesting combos. For use during your Quest - and beyond!

🌐 About the digital platform (The Portal) The Portal* is a digital space (hosted on Notion) that contains bonus stories, extra missions, an audio version of the book, and our Communal Journal: a global hive mind database of Magic research. The Portal is designed to grow over time, inviting you to add your own contributions. *Everyone who buys the book (physical or digital) gains access to the Portal.

Order on Metalabel

P.s - we are thrilled to be releasing this project on . Their ethos around making creative life and work more collaborative and less isolated is so aligned with our own values that I couldn’t think of a better home for our first release. The first seed of this project even came out of a Metalabel initiative called Lonely Writer’s Club. I’ll be sharing more about the step-by-step process of co-creating this book and what we’ve learnt in future newsletters.

Book Launch events

We’re hosting x2 free launch events in London and Margate (online to follow).

Wed 29 October @ Bar Nothing, Margate
Thu 06 November @ Vout-O-Rennees, London

You can expect
✷ A short talk from Creative Quests founder Sam Furness
✷ An exploration of the book design with Ana Grigorovici
✷ Creative games and Magical activities
✷ Books + card decks will be available to purchase on the night

This is a big moment for our community.

Since 2021 we’ve been creating space for mutual curiosity and creative exploration as a shared practice. Our work has existed in experience, cohort-based formats - which is often hard to quantify.

This debut release feels like our proof of existence, a flag in a ground, and a spotlight on the brilliant people that Creative Quests continues to attract.

Today also marks the beginning of us operating as a collective - as we share our first collaborative piece of work.

The form of this project has shape shifted along the way (could you expect anything less in a book about Magic?) but the idea was always clear: create something together that didn’t just tell stories, but invited others to explore them with us.

This is more than a book. It’s an invitation to experience the world differently.

The theme of Magic was a rich one to immerse ourselves in. Full of whimsy and wonder, yes, but also full of connection and care.

Go get a copy, use it to fuel to your curiosity, and report back!

Questers: WE DID IT!!

Order: The Quester's Guide

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

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Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 All throughout October our Quest theme is Letters!

We have 50 curious humans all channelling their curiosity in the same letterish direction and seeing what we can learn / create along the way. Although our doors are closed to this cohort, we’ll be sharing some of our favourite discoveries and practices here throughout the month to fuel your own creative explorations!

Trying out a different format this week.

Normally, I write a short thought piece about curiosity and creative process, then follow up with some cool links that have inspired me. But I often feel like there’s more to say about said cool links… so here is a slightly different Best of the Quest edition of The Quest Digest.

1. An event invitation to play with Letters

Every Quest, we invite someone with unparalleled wisdom on our theme to run a guest workshop. This month it’s one of my favourite creative people out there - the spectacular Kelli Anderson.

Kelli is a graphic designer, educator, and author of the frankly mind-blowing, Alphabet in Motion, an interactive book about typography and technology. Seriously... check out the video below!

Next Wednesday, Kelli will be running a workshop all about how Letters get their shape and show us how to make our own morphing letter forms. Come join us!

Talk & Workshop with Kelli Anderson
🗓️ Wed 15 Oct on Zoom
6.00pm - 7.30pm BST
1.00pm - 2.30pm EST

Every attendee will leave with a resource list and Letters-themed challenge to explore.

Get your ticket

2. Museum of forgotten letters

Where do letters go that have no recipient address? Stories and messages that needed to be expressed but not received by any one person in particular - whether by choice or because the intended receiver is no longer around to read them.

In 2012, artist Saya Kubota transformed the abandoned post office of Awashima into a sanctuary for undelivered letters - messages addressed to the lost, the departed, or to no one at all. After the residency was over, local postmaster Katsuhisa Nakata (aged 78 at the time) thought it seemed crazy for such a project to end… Fast forward 13 years later (aged 91), he still tends to these delicate fragments of memory as a museum, which grows by hundreds every year - open to the public to visit and read.

First of all, the film itself is stunning. There’s a beautiful story packed into just eight and a half minutes. When thinking about creativity, what struck me was the effect that time has on the nature of our creative projects.

The Missing Post Office project still would have been a brilliant art project if it had run for a summer and then ended. But Mr. Nakata’s persistence in this postmaster role for 13 years adds an entirely new dimension. Time itself becomes part of the art — much like tending to a garden.

3. Alphabetical experiments from our community

Sam (me!): One of our grounding practices at the start of any Quest is to ‘take your theme for a walk’. It’s a simple way of tuning into the world around you and practicing the art of noticing. I decided to take my Letter walk up a notch and set myself the challenge of finding every letter of the alphabet (in order!) from shapes in my environment. Here is my finished A-Z! The time to beat is 1hr51… time starts now.

Aggi: Is going in on sending letters by mail. She put all 26 letters of the alphabet into a bag, and each day is pulling a letter out. Her mission? To send a handwritten letter to somebody she knows whose name starts with that initial! A truly mammoth task that’s prompting her to dig deep into her memory (and address book!). What an amazing experiment in connection!

Aliena: In a similarly alphabetical fashion, she is writing a newsletter each day inspired by a different letter. The series, ingeniously called A-letter-ation, is an exploration of language and association that feels both experimental, playful, and personal. This will be such an impressive collection when complete (it already is!).

4. DO!

Letters Live is an event series where well-known figures from the worlds of art, acting, and music read out iconic letters from throughout time. It’s a rare experience to hear such direct and private words shared in a public setting - revealing how we write when we don’t expect there to be an audience listening.

The crème de la crème of these letters comes from a rousing exchange between artist Sol LeWitt and fellow artist Eva Hesse, performed by Benedict Cumberbatch. While Hesse was suffering from a period of creative block, LeWitt penned this letter as a way to motivate her to continue to make and do - no matter the outcome.

It’s not only essential listening for any creative human being - but also a vivid example of stream-of-consciousness writing, which shrugs off the earnestness that letter writing can sometimes conjure.

5. Hate Mail you might just enjoy receiving

Mr Bingo is an artist who doesn’t shy away from being, well, offensive. He’s so good at it, in fact, that people pay him to abuse them in letter form.

In 2015, Mr Bingo advertised that people could commission him to send them bespoke hate mail. All he needed was a bit of information, a link to their social media, and a postal address. The final collection was released as a coffee table art book. If that isn’t platforming hate, I don’t know what is 😉

Beyond the brilliant illustrations and seriously cutting writing is a super-smart project that takes something as benign as a postcard, as culturally relevant as trolling — and remixes them together to create something that feels completely new.

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Hope you enjoyed this different format - I enjoyed spending a bit more time sharing the Questy fimdns.

Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

the small print

👁 Follow us on Instagram 
✉️ Know someone in need of a creativity boost? Send them this newsletter.
❤️ Hitting the heart button makes us feel loved and listened to!

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 It’s always at this point - just a few days out from a new Creative Quest that the jitters set in. A whole month, a global group, exploring a perception-expanding theme with no fixed outcome?!

We are 16 Quests into this experiment in collective curiosity…. and we haven’t failed to create magic yet.

You have 3 days left to sign up!

We kick off Inspiration Session #1 on Tuesday 30 Sep at 6pm BST / 1pm EST
📺 How a Quest works - in 2 mins.

Join October's Quest

Being a Prism

As the light changes, so does our perception. Autumn always reminds me of this. The way the sun shifts, shadows stretch, and colours deepen.

I’m sure most of us can remember playing with a prism at some point. Maybe in a school science lesson - the simple magic of holding a peculiar glass object to the light and, suddenly, a rainbow spilling out of your own hands.

If you haven’t tried it as an adult, I promise: watching white light break into full-spectrum wonder is no less miraculous.

Britannica defines refraction as “the change in direction of a wave as it passes from one medium to another.”

By that definition: every one of us has the power to refract.

Imagine that white light is everything we are exposed to; experiences, images, stories, conversations, the noise of daily life. All the raw ingredients that shape our worldview. This is why it matters what we choose to expose ourselves to. (We call it Questing.) If you aren’t intentional, the world is choosing your inputs for you.

But input is only the beginning.

Being a prism means more than absorbing inputs, aka light. It means choosing to express it. To take the raw material of living and separate it into its constituent colours. To refract.

Creativity, at its heart, is refraction: receiving signals from the world, processing how they move us, and expressing them in a way that only we could.

And the wonder is: we all refract differently.

In our Quests, everyone begins with the same theme: Colour, Magic, Rewilding, or whatever we’re exploring that month. Theme clues for October anybody/ Yet the paths fork in infinite directions. The same beam of light, refracted into a spectrum of curiosities, experiments, and stories.

And there’s a further layer to this: in his groundbreaking experiments, Sir Isaac Newton noticed that not only do prisms bend light- but when refracted light passes through a second prism, it recombines back into white light.

Science!

This reversal is true of creativity too.

Sometimes the greatest artistry isn’t in expanding into complexity, but in distilling complexity back to clarity. A photograph that speaks a thousand words. A single lyric that takes you on an epic journey.

The lesson here is this: Our inner prisms are mighty creative tools. The challenge is not to obstruct them with comparison, distraction, or fear.

The most impressive displays of creativity - come from those who trust their prism fully, refracting the world in a way no one else could.

A round up of illuminating discoveries from our Quester world…

🎨 A history of colour according the Smithsonian

🌱 When are artists ‘too old’ to be emerging?

🍁 Colours of the Autumn equinox

🛝 Play needs a rebrand (hard agree!) via

🚗 One of my all time favourite internet finds - Roadside Wildflowers at Full Speed

🎤 How to get better at the things you care about

🚶‍♀️WalkingLab studies and advances the theory and practice of critical walking

😍 Attention is an instrument of love

“If the sun’s light consisted of but one sort of rays, there would be but one colour in the whole world.” – Sir Isaac Newton

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Joining a Quest! Our last one kicks off this October. Sign up closes this Sunday 28 Sep.
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

the small print

👁 Follow us on Instagram 
✉️ Know someone in need of a creativity boost? Send them this newsletter.
❤️ Hitting the heart button makes us feel loved and listened to!

Dear Questers,

Sam here 👋 The seasons are turning and there are just 10 days left to sign up to October’s Creative Quest (our last of 2025).

We keep our themes a mystery till sign up closes and there is good reason for that: the creative power of the unknown.

But why is the unknown such a powerful force for our creativity?
🤔 When we embrace ‘not knowing’ we free ourselves from assumption and expectation on how things ‘should be’ done.
😲 Therefore we explore subjects we would never have chosen for ourselves.
👁️ By not sharing our themes way in advance - we create groups with diverse interests and perspectives.
💐All ingredients for a environment where collective curiosity and creativity can thrive!

🍿 A 2 min video on how our Quest programme works
🗓️ Dates for October’s live sessions (all recorded)

For those still unsure… here are some clues to October’s theme!
*insert Pink Panther theme tune*

Join October's Quest

The Warped Scale of Creative Life

Something I've noticed over a lifetime of creative exploration is how the way creative people relate to the world can sometimes feel totally at odds with the pace and scale of "reality".

The proximity we have to our projects and ideas seems to bend the time-space continuum, creating a feeling of both dissonance and joy. Living in the world of our projects can feel comforting - a welcome cocoon, protected from the expectations of the rest of life. The dissonance comes when we step back into that other reality, where our internal sense of scale doesn't quite match what everyone else is experiencing.

Below are five examples of where I've noticed my sense of scale has been warped in the creative process (or creative life, full stop!). This is by no means an exhaustive list.

Time

“What is time then? If nobody asks me, I know; but if I were desirous to explain it to one that should ask me, plainly I do not know.”  — St. Augustine

When you're making creative work - especially if you're sharing it, applying for support, or waiting on a "yes" from a potential partner or collaborator - time gets weird.

A week without a reply can feel monumental. It can feel like the difference between momentum and stagnation, between confidence and doubt. In the rest of life, a week is nothing - a trip to the supermarket, seeing a friend or two - a blink! But in creative life, a week can feel like a stretchy eternity. In these instances, I've tried to remind myself that a lack of response isn't necessarily about a lack of care, but a different experience of time.

On the contrary… creative people can happily tend to the minutiae of an idea for years. An almost bonsai tree-like relationship: a clip here, a clip there. The passage of time, and how we change as people, slowly shaping the idea. It looks like nothing is happening - and then one day, you know it's complete.

Language

“One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple.” — Jack Kerouac

One of the hardest things for any creative person is finding the right words to succinctly talk about their art or work. To us, our projects are tangled up with our whole being - they hold layers, meanings, contradictions. So when we try to explain them, we tend to lay everything out at once (guilty. as. charged). Our ideas can sound garbled, undefined, or confusing.

What I've noticed is that a clarifying magic comes when we find just one word - the right word - that unlocks everything. I've seen whole creative practices reorient around a single word that crystallizes its essence.

Just yesterday, one Quester in our community emailed me saying that after 3 years of dipping in and out of exploring the concept of Place in their work… a single word that came up in our latest Quest programme unlocked an 11-page essay. The word was 'Crushy'.

One word. A new world.

Money

“Cash Rules Everything Around Me. C.R.E.A.M. Get the money, dollar dollar bill y’all” — Wu Tang Clan

A lot of us aren't working on creative projects for money. And yet, cash - even a small amount - can transform a project. A grant of a few hundred pounds might not cover everything, but it carries external validation. It says: someone else believes in this. And that belief can fuel confidence and progress in disproportionate ways.

Creative people know how to stretch a small budget absurdly far, because we're tuned to what really matters. A little money goes a long way - not just practically, but psychologically.

Compliments

"I can live for two months on a good compliment" — Mark Twain

Creative people are no strangers to resistance. Rejection, self-doubt, and waiting for replies are our second language. So, someone simply saying "this is brilliant," "this is such an interesting perspective," or "this is too good to give up on - keep going" can power an entire project forward.

When you are listening to someone speak about their idea - think about how you can help them from both a critical and confidence point of view. Don't shy away from asking hard questions (creative people need this too). But also reflect back what you admire. Because without that, critique can feel like another wall.

Be someone's booster pack.

Beauty

"Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it" — Confucius

Creative people often notice or appreciate beauty at scales others might overlook. What might seem mundane to many can be a source of fascination (borderline obsession) for creatives.

The detail of a favourite manhole cover. The odd design inside a security envelope. The joy of spotting your favourite tree in another country.

These small things can light up an entire day. They help us feel connected to the world, and that connection is our source energy.

I really would like to know… where do you feel your sense of scale is warped by creativity?

Leave a comment

A round up of illuminating discoveries from our Quester world..

🛝 Europe’s future should begin in its playgrounds. An amazing report on Europe becoming the ‘continent of play’

🎛️ The Curiosity Mixing Board by Peter Söderlind is a playful illustration created to bring together some of the elements from the complex field of curiosity.

👕 Clothes designed for hostile architecture

✅ The creative cheat sheet - an incredibly useful tool for easily finding resources online

🎧 Oneliness is a new podcast (and excellently named concept) by Monika Jiang - exploring loneliness as a deeply human experience

🐣 Restless Egg is an incubator for Artist-Founders (mostly working with tech)

👋 Hi from a Human is a movement and way to mark that your work was created by human ingenuity.

🎹 I adore this break down of how Pharrell created a sonic-brand mark to the songs he produced by adding a count in to every song. Genius.

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Joining a Quest! Our next one kicks off in October.
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email.
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

the small print

👁 Follow us on Instagram 
✉️ Know someone in need of a creativity boost? Send them this newsletter.
❤️ Hitting the heart button makes us feel loved and listened to!

Sign Up Now

In this weeks edition…
✷ An exploration of Shivers: what they are and how to find them. By guest columnist Allison Blair
✷ Three weeks left to sign up for October’s Quest
✷ A glittering array of illuminating links to check out

Dear Questers,

Every so often, we like to hand the reins of this newsletter over to a fellow Quester, so you can experience the joy of Questing through their eyes and words. Show, don’t tell, as they say.

Right now, we’re three weeks into a “bring your own theme” exploration - a collective experiment that’s brought a small crew of us closer together as we wander through themes as varied as Weaving, Place Attachment, Helpfulness, and What If?

This week’s guest columnist, Allison Blair, is exploring the theme of Shivers. It’s a delightfully curious choice: a universal sensation we’ve all felt, yet one that still carries an air of mystery.

How did you dream up the Quest theme of Shivers?

Allison Blair: I landed on Shivers as a theme as I was chasing a feeling I couldn’t shake after completing the last community Quest in April, on the theme of Maps. During that Quest, I got really enveloped in psychogeography; the concept of understanding your psychological relationship to a place. I became transfixed by metaphorical wormholes into places that seemed like ‘elsewhere’. Architecture that felt like a different time. Construction street symbols that felt like signs from a different world. I was chilled by the fantastical brilliance hiding underneath and all around my city. Of course, I wanted to uncover more of it!

All this naturally connected to one of my all time favorite video games called Disco Elysium - a detective role player game where your playable skills are composed of aspects that make up the main character’s personality. One such skill is called “shivers” and is described as:

“Raise the hair on your neck. Tune into the city… Shivers come when the temperature drops and you become more keenly aware of your surroundings. It enables you to hear the city itself, to truly belong to the streets.”

This reframe was fascinating to me: the idea of a seemingly involuntary sensation being treated more like a skill, that could potentially be tuned like a radio frequency.

I wondered if I could use this feeling as a magnet to draw me closer to the out of place and be more aware of all the hidden things around us. So I am Questing to deeply explore that feeling and try to understand why it was even there in the first place!

Where have you begun to notice Shivers in the world around you?

AB: If we’re talking purely about the physical, then it’s been really amazing to watch how trees shiver. Especially as the season is starting to change. The temperatures are slowly dropping. The wind is picking up. And just the way wind rattles through the leaves sounds like whispers. What’s crazy is that this is only just a recent revelation of mine. Something that I was always aware of but never paid much attention to until now.

On a slightly more metaphorical note, I’ve also been curious about the concept of ‘fridge logic’. It is a trope in media to describe the delayed moment of realization when something mysterious suddenly clicks into place. And whether the resounding feeling is awe or fear. This reminds me of a time I tried to write a story inspired by a randomly generated trope for fun and what I got was fridge logic. What transpired was a story quite literally about a guy who found a portal to a different dimension inside his fridge and how he tried to make sense of it.

The story was never finished, but I still really like the idea of doing something creatively very literal with shivers. Maybe in the form of a grocery shopping list taped to the fridge. And it’s only when you read it through a couple times that the true chill settles it. The ideas are still percolating 😉

What were your original ideas about Shivers and has the process of Questing produced any surprises so far?

AB: I think I was mostly coming in assuming that there would be a lot of deeper information or study about why we experience shivers. It was really surprising to find out that this is not the case. Scientists understand that we shiver when we’re cold as the body’s way to warm up. But as for why we might shiver when we read a particularly chilling book? Or when we get goosebumps after hearing a really good song? It’s not really known why this happens.

Coming up short in this way has turned this Quest into less about the theme itself and rather looking at all of the things it affects or intersects with. It’s becoming less about trying to understand shivers in general and more about trying to understand shivers in myself.

Have you encountered a Shivers-related creative practice we could try?

AB: This isn’t really an official practice, but I thought it was a fascinating way to try and encounter shivers.

One of the first activities you’re instructed to undertake when starting a Quest is to ’take your theme for a walk’. It’s an invitation to change your perception and use your Quest theme as a lens to view your town/city. Where can you see the theme that you couldn’t see before?

As for shivers, I modified this exercise by mixing inspiration from the game, Disco Elysium with a participatory walk from artist collective, Elastic City. The idea is to take a walk while paying special attention to the things you can feel on the back of your neck. Particularly as you cross thresholds. Pay less attention to what you can see or hear. And instead, ask yourself if you can notice a change in the air.

How has Questing grown your creative practice / life in general?

AB: Questing has quite literally gotten me creating again. My background is in film and video production, yet I have not held a job in that field in a little over four years. I unfortunately lost my last videography job back in 2021 and that is when I discovered Creative Quests.

In a period of time where I was feeling rather ashamed and unconfident and sorry for myself, Creative Quests was the electric, wild, and welcoming community I so sorely needed.

Questing has taught me that I can still claim the title of “artist” even though I am not currently doing it professionally. That the simple act of making or being curious about something is fulfilling enough. That limitations are invitations. And that when you’re a little lost, the invisible starts to become more visible.

I’ve been Questing for 4 years - 9 themes and counting - and I have no intention of stopping anytime soon. Each Quest is like a speed boost for my creativity. A portal to another dimension. I am so thrilled to be a part of this absolutely phenomenal community and I look forward to creating more chain reactions of inspiration for each other.

Outside of shivers - what have been your favourite other Quest themes?

AB: They are all SO good…

100 percent, Maps (April 2025) is definitely up there! I had so much fun exploring psychogeography and the hidden world underneath the city. And even made my first zine as part of this Quest. Inspired by the incomprehensible nature of construction symbols, I designed a field guide of my own urban hieroglyphs. It’s been thrilling to not only use the guide myself, but also hide copies for folks in my neighborhood to find.

Other theme favorites have to include Time (October 2022). That was the second Quest I did and was the spark for me to start a youtube channel to showcase my video art after having lost my videography job. So, that was really special to me for a lot of reasons. There’s also the first Bring Your Own Theme Quest (July 2023) where I picked Surreal as my theme and created an interactive art project called the Bureau of Safe Diversion (inspired by the Bureau of Surrealist Research).

In any case, can’t wait for the next one!

Thank you Allison!

Come explore a brand new Quest theme with Allison + many other curious humans this October!

A round up of illuminating discoveries from Allison’s Questy world + a couple of our own

From Allison:
🚶‍♀️ Explore the Elastic City: Prompts and ideas from a collective devoted to the the art of walking

🤠 Mysterious Nashville - the curious embrace confusion in this in-real-life ARG

📺 TV Tropes - an all devouring wiki database of recurring elements in storytelling

🕸️ Marginalia - a search tool that pulls from the very fringes of the internet

👻 Reddact - point and click web game exploring a modern ghost town shrouded in mystery

🗺️ Bureau of Unknown Destinations - experience the thrill of not knowing where you’re going

From CQ:

📍 The rise of the travelling third space

🤖 AI is remixing everything we’ve ever made

🍓What if conservation started with berry picking?

Finally…

That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! A lot of time, heart and energy goes into writing this newsletter. If you enjoy what we do at Creative Quests, you can support us or get involved by:

✷ Joining a Quest! Our next one kicks off in October.
✷ Booking us for a talk or workshop in your community or organisation. If you want to know more - just hit reply on this email!
✷ Sharing this newsletter with a curious loved one

❤️ Or simply hitting the heart button makes us feel listened to.

Quest love,
Sam x
CQ HQ

🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness

the small print

👁 Follow us on Instagram 
✉️ Know someone in need of a creativity boost? Send them this newsletter.
❤️ Hitting the heart button makes us feel loved and listened to!