An Imagination Training Plan
QD #91 💭 Curiosity Correspondence: Dispatch 01
In this weeks edition…
✷ Introducing: our new Curiosity Correspondent: Hannah Singleman.
✷ Inspiration: A six-step ‘imagination training plan’
✷ Update: Release Day 2026 is growing! 2000 of you are releasing projects on May 29 🤯
✷ Attend: our play day retreat in London on June 20.
✷ Respond: Take our reader survey and shape the future of this newsletter
📬 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!
Dispatches from Hannah Singleman, your Curiosity Correspondent. Reporting from the frontlines of Creative Quests' experiment in collective curiosity.
🎆 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.
✷ Austin Kleon 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!
🏡 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.
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
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