By Astelina Applegate
The Young Creatives Collective has officially kicked off for a second year with a weekend residential in Manchester. We all arrived a little weary from the travelling; but this did not impact our excitement to meet each other. This year, we have a wonderful cohort of 12 – six returning members, and six new faces – from across England, including Nottingham, London and Huddersfield.
Once we had checked into our lovely rooms at Manchester Metropolitan University‘s Archway Halls. After a brief solo reset – we all met for a warm-up session. We kicked off writing acrostics of our name to reflect how we felt about the residential starting and drew our past First Story anthology covers before heading up to the flat kitchens to make pizzas for supper. This was followed by late-night zine-making (and maybe a little too much bonding over singing)!
On Day two, we all woke up, shared breakfast, and took a lovely stroll to the inspiring Manchester Museum where we had lively sessions and discussions, drafted the zine call-out, had social media training and decided on our roles. During lunch, we also visited the awe-inspiring Central Library, and ended with a really nice dinner out, thank you Navarro Lounge!
Day three can only be described as short and sweet. We used mind mapping and voting to decide on the theme and title of our zine. Once decided, we broke off into our admin, comms, and design teams to discuss what we need to do for the second edition of Inkling: A Brief Pause, before finishing our day off with a wander around the museum and then the hardest part of saying goodbye to everybody!
Thank you very much, Rose, Annette, Viktoria from First Story and the members of the Young Creatives Collective for such an amazing weekend. It’s been truly memorable, and I look forward to the privilege of being on the YCC this year!”
Young Creatives Collective zine 2026 – open for submissions
