Serendipity and Sparks

QD #87 💛 on crossing thresholds & introducing our new Quest Guide: Sparks.

In this weeks edition…
✷ I just became a Dad!
✷ An interview with our new Quest Guide: Sparks!
✷ Sign up for our next Quest: Kicking off Feb 3rd
✷ Take our reader survey and shape the future of this newsletter

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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.

I feel a whole exploration of creativity and parenthood brewing in the years to come.

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.

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Meet your host for February’s Quest: Sparks ⚡️

There could not be a better guide for this next phase of the adventure!

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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:

Seeking: Citizens of Curiosity 📍 CQ2026

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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.

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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.

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CQ: Who are your top 3 creativity heroes?

Sparks:

• Es Devlin (set designer)

• Marina Abramović (performance artist)

• Rob Hopkins (imagination activist)

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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