Re-storying our place in the world
👁🗨 Quest Digest #23. Attention New Yorkers: we're in New York all next week 🍏❤️
THE QUEST DIGEST by Creative Quests is a treasure chest of ideas, stories & opportunities exploring what it means to live an illuminating, creative life. Delivered when inspiration strikes.
Hey folks,
Sam here 👋 11 days into our current Creative Quest exploring Storytelling and it’s opened up some rabbit holes that is for sure…
Before I give you a little slice of some of the Storytelling discoveries and learnings - reminding you that we have x2 live Creative Quests events happening this month in New York (May 21) and London (May 27)! We are in NYC all of next week!
Excursions is our first experiment in taking the month-long magic of a Quest and squeezing it into an inspiration packed 3 hour experience. Each Excursion is themed and involves a walk around the neighbourhood the event is held in to gather inspiration. The world is your studio, after all! Read more and get tickets here.
Whether you have joined a Quest before or not - we’d love to meet some more of you IRL! Especially you NYC folks - Substack tells me there are more New Yorkers on this mailing list than other other city in the world 🍏❤️
🗽 We’ll be in NYC 15-23 May
What creative people and places should we connect with and visit?
Let us know in the comments!
💭 “What is the boundary of me…?”
This week we were lucky to be joined in session by Paddy Loughman, one of the co-authors and founders of Stories for Life. A platform seeking to explore and interrogate the power that cultural stories and narratives have in the way we relate and connect to the world around us.
It was a fascinating, and challenging journey, where we learnt how the dominant narrative in the West became nature being our slave and productivity being success. We examined advertising campaigns, cultural tales and Hollywood films that serve this separation narrative to us as entertainment and comfort every day.
It made us see storytelling, more specifically the stories we accept as the norm, in a completely new way. It was exactly the spanner in the works we hope for in a Guest Quester workshop (thank you Paddy!).
Stories for Life work centres around a framework of how we might turn Horror Stories (built on gain and separation) into Love stories (built on connection and wellbeing). One provocation that has clung to me in particular being ‘Where do I end… what is the boundary of me?’. It’s a stunning thought. Do we cease to exist past our skin? The air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat - is that a part of us?
If we saw more cultural stories that centered nature as our family, a part of us not separate: would we treat it better to treat ourselves better?
A round up of illuminating discoveries from the world of Storytelling…
😴 Bedtime stories for adults from Nothing Much Happens.
🗣 Stories Without Borders. A free online conference. 25+ international storytelling and narrative experts will share how to use stories to build bridges between people, teams, companies, past, present and future!
🌍 Re-storying: the process of reconstructing new meaning from old narratives.
📽 A short documentary about Jonathan Thunder, exploring the inspirations behind his surrealist paintings and animations and taking a critical look at our shared mythologies
🏃♂️Tom Hanks discusses himself as a storyteller and how playing with his siblings as a child was formative for his acting career in this episode of The Great Creators with Guy Raz.
** These links were co-curated by our brand new Archivist contributor, Melanie Knight. Thanks Melanie!
… and beyond.
🐙 A more-than-human manifesto by Superflux
📸 This powerful ad using Stuart Semple’s blackest black paint will make you realise your blind spots…
🎉 The Celebration Lab is in NYC this weekend (13 May). Get your confetti portrait taken and revel in cathartic joy.
🔮 Our frankly genius pals at Radar just dropped their new report on the future of Play. They are pushing the boundaries of co-created report making in both process and form. Genuinely in awe!
Finally…
On Monday I will be setting off to New York for a week of meeting Questers, seeing friends, having meetings, creative sightseeing and hosting our first ever live event 😁
In the last 2.5 years - to my utter delight - Creative Quests has reached more people than I could have ever hoped for. From lowly side project beginnings - my ambition for deepening the impact and widening the reach of this work has only grown stronger in that time. The thing I am perhaps most proud of - is that a lot of this has been done from my laptop, in my North London bedroom (alongside remote help from other people in theirs - thank you Tiz, Mildred, Sparks).
Making the trip to New York feels like a significant marker in the journey of Creative Quests. We were born in a time where travelling outside your neighbourhood, let alone your country (!), was not possible. With the world re-open and peoples IRL muscle memory creeping back - it feels like the start of all new possibilities for bringing the Quest life to real life.
Remember: Your creativity is an adventure waiting to happen.
Sam + CQ HQ
x
🥾 Quest Guide / Founder
📲 @saaamfurness
THE QUEST DIGEST by Creative Quests is a treasure chest of ideas & stories exploring what it means to live an illuminating, creative life. Delivered when inspiration and creativity strike. Subscribe to receive each issue!
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