SpillianQuest: Questing Residencies
A place for creators to rest, revel, and return bearing gifts.
SpillianQuest: reveling fuel for people yearning to make meaning.
A mycelial web of tools, toys, treats, adventures, and boon companions
SpillianQuest is the next great unfolding of Spillian: a living, breathing network of imagination that threads together artists, seekers, and revelers across time and place. Like a mycelial web: the vast underground network of fungal threads that connects and facilitates the exchange of nutrients, water, and information between plants — its strength lies in connection: invisible threads nourishing visible fruiting bodies — events, products, performances, and ideas.
The Questing Residencies are among these fruiting bodies: tangible gatherings born from the invisible weave of story, care, and generosity that links all we do. Each residency extends that living web, inviting artists and thinkers to join the League of Spillian Revelers and co-create the culture of imagination we are building together.
Please note: Questing Residencies are offered by invitation from Spillian; we do not accept applications.
The Spirit
Questing Residencies invite creators whose work is steeped in imagination, courage, and kindness to come dream with us in the Catskills. They are not transactional grants or quiet retreats but reciprocal acts of co-creation; shared experiments in what happens when place, imagination, and the intentionality of gathering coalesce. Spillian offers space, sustenance, and time to breathe. Residents offer story, song, image, or reflection that becomes part of the living weave of SpillianQuest.
Group Residencies
The Questing Residencies, in this form, are group residencies; usually up to eight artists, collaborators, or boon companions who come as an ensemble, collective, or loosely affiliated circle. We work with a single group host or liaison to shape the timing and focus of the residency, and each participant signs a simple individual acknowledgment of the shared agreement.
| Spillian Offers | Residents Offer |
| Lodging, extraordinary meals, and time to dwell in the space — a gift valued at over $400 per person per day, sustained by the same imagination and care that infuse everything at Spillian. | An artistic or reflective response created during or after the residency: a song, essay, poem, visual work, short video, etc. that becomes part of the SpillianQuest archive. |
| Connection to the Spillian community and the mythic ground of the estate. | A creative contribution to the SpillianQuest weave, Spillian retains the right to share, exhibit, and archive this work (with full credit and context) as part of our collective storytelling and ongoing cultural project. |
| Opportunities for informal sharing, communal feasts, and public gatherings as part of our Imaginarium offerings. | Active participation in the League of Spillian Revelers, the fellowship of artists, dreamers, and makers who carry Spillian’s imagination into the world. Every resident joins the League as part of their residency, continuing the reciprocity long after departure. |
| A platform and audience that can help amplify the resident’s work. | Ongoing acknowledgment of Spillian as part of the creative lineage of any work that germinated here — in program notes, social media, publications, or recordings — helping others trace the mycelial web of inspiration forward. |
We think of this as a circle of currency: time, attention, imagination, and care are all part of the same economy. By naming the tangible value of what Spillian offers, and by ensuring that each creative work carries a trace of its origin, we make that circle visible so generosity can be met with reciprocity, gratitude, and continuity, a living current moving in all directions through the mycelial web we share.
The League of Spillian Revelers is a living community of those who’ve created, celebrated, or imagined deeply at Spillian. Membership is a commitment to shared imagination and mutual support—carrying Spillian’s spirit forward, and letting it nourish members’ own work in return.
Before and After the Residency
To help us weave each residency into the larger SpillianQuest story, we ask residents to share a few things with us to help us honor the residency publicly and invite others into the ongoing quest. They include:
- A brief hope or dream statement about the work or the question they’re bringing. Wild, poetic, or open-ended; we welcome the imaginal as much as the concrete.
- Afterward, a few words about their experience: what was valuable, surprising, or transforming about their time as a SpillianQuest Resident. These reflections, creative or reflective, become part of our collective narrative.
- Continue as an active and generous part of the living web of SpillianQuest, sharing the work that began here, honoring its creative lineage, and contributing to this ongoing collaborative venture through imagination, care, and participation.
Stewardship
Spillian itself is an artistic experiment, created and tended by two working artists who have chosen to make hospitality, imagination, and meaning their shared medium. There is no large corporation or foundation underwriting this work; it exists through intention, labor, and love. Each residency is therefore both gift and experiment, and the reciprocity of the Questing Residencies helps sustain not only this program but the living work of Spillian itself.
If you’d like to know when the next Questing Residency public creative sharing bubbles up, keep an eye on our Imaginarium schedule and join our email list. It’s where we share what’s unfolding, when it’s ready to be shared. These events are invitations into the living weave of Spillian—brief, bright glimpses of what took root here.
The Origins
While we have informally welcomed a range of creators and thinkers to recharge at Spillian since we opened, our inaugural formal residencies welcomed a cohort of songwriters convened by artist and activist Carsie Blanton. Her first visit to Spillian for a concert in 2023 opened a shared curiosity about what could unfold if a group of creators gathered here with intention. She and a group of songwriters committed to changing the world gathered at Spillian in January of 2024, and with wit, focus, and some hella good songwriting, opened the path towards Questing Residencies. This video is an unexpected and beloved boon from this crew, caught on Carsie’s phone in the Four Seasons Room, and is the best camp song ever. We love them all.
The Fit
Questing Residencies are by invitation from Spillian only. We recognize that there are many creators hungering for experiences like this, and we wish we could underwrite them all. Because Spillian is both a working institution and an artistic experiment, with no foundation or external funding, these residencies are carefully selected and curated offers that allow us to be generous while also tending the ongoing sustainability of Spillian as a place.
We invite creators and cohorts we already know and whose work resonates with our ethos of reveling, remembering, and reimagining. In most cases, that relationship begins through our public work—coming to Imaginarium gatherings, becoming part of our community, or, at times, being invited to Spillian as a performer or collaborator whose work is clearly in conversation with ours. We look for groups who already have a shared practice, a committed creative community, and a “larger-than-you” intention about making the world better. Even then, residencies emerge only when the alignment between people, work, and where we are in our own quest is unmistakably right.
Quest residents care not only about their own creative journeys, but also about the communities they help shape and about the stewardship of opportunities for all who make. Each residency is a shared act of tending: of the work, the place, and the wider mycelial web of imagination that connects us all. They are playful, thoughtful collaborations in the Spillian way, rooted in story, hospitality, and curiosity.
