NOT an agenda for idiosyncratic creative collaborations: sharing stories about trees, childhoods, council estates, roots, blackbirds, textures, up/unrootedness, families, anxieties, darkness, tears, play, class, punches, burnout, loss, trauma, bereavement, joy, curiosity, care, craft, hope, hugs, laughter, weirdness, wonky art, grandparents, dogs, ghosts, drains, swearing, Poplar Avenue, plant pots, blackberries, buddleias, the revelatory capacities of minor geographies… and maybe bears?

We study, theorise, advocate for play … but our working lives are often not playful. Haunted by this realisation, we explore the potential of idiosyncratic creative collaborations for re/kindling faith and enthusiasm, enabling new ways of witnessing minor geographies of childhood and youth. The paper is written from, and about, one such collaboration: a six-year, shared process of writing minor stories about childhood trees, which branched into all kinds of unanticipated moods, memories, textures, and territories. Drawing on Katz's minor theory, we situate this collaboration in relation to calls for creative and/or ludic turns in Human Geography and contemporary social sciences, particularly storied and autoethnographic approaches in childhood and youth studies. Our fragments of stories thus join a forest of trees, tree-research and tree narratives in Children's Geographies, contributing to wider interdisciplinary conceptualisations of multispecies childhoods and more-than-human geographies. The ‘major contribution’ of the paper is to provide provocations, theoretical parameters, and practical prompts for idiosyncratic creative collaborations. But really, it is about valuing and trusting ideas that seem minor or non-normative: NOT trying to be impactful as we are meant to in the contemporary neoliberal academy.