“Tom thought about a mustang with a man’s arms and legs, with a woman’s soft hands and smooth skin. He thought about stepping on the gas and push, push, pushing until something broke inside.”

Early Friday night, on the stage of The Vault in Downtown Nanaimo, the voice of Taylor Fleming rings clear as she reads her short story, “Mustang.” She’s read three poems; I saw the first through my camera lens, and then returned to my seat, eager to enjoy her performance. She was the recipient of the Kevin Roberts Poetry Award in 2024, and the Meadowlarks Award for Fiction in 2025.

Every chair is filled. A surprising amount of tables are occupied by journals or sheets of paper in preparation for the upcoming open mic. Unsuspecting passerby traipse in and out for their evening coffee, ducking the view of Fleming’s captivated audience.

As a student majoring in Creative Writing at VIU, it is sometimes hard to tell how big the writing community in Nanaimo really is. I’m biased, and writers are habitually self-involved. I’m surrounded not just by my peers, but by creatives unknown to me—all equally thrilled to attend—I was a single printed letter in an overflowing library.

“We go to class every day, we see people every day,” Fleming says afterwards. “But when you come to these, you see who is paying attention and … who wants to be here.”

All of the pre-performance anxiety has washed away, allowing everything else to finally sink in. That nervous buzz from before has turned into excited, restless energy. I almost think she should hop back onstage.

“I feel very supported by my community,” she says.

~

Dalton Derkson and Jesslyn Derkson are the co-publishers behind Nanaimo-based poetry press, a square house. On January 19, they presented Nanaimo’s newest reading series, Grub Street. Taylor Fleming and Elke Sorensen were spotlighted as featured writers, and their performances were followed by an open mic and a lucky draw.

“Both of us have been involved with the poetry scene for about 15 years or so now in various different cities,” Dalton Derkson explains. He and Jesslyn Derkson met at Carleton University in Ottawa, where they participated in student magazine In/Words, local open mics, and editorials. A few years later, they were married.

Originally arriving in Nanaimo because Dalton Derkson worked in radio, the two became entranced by the experimental scene and knitted community.

“There’s a lot of freaks and weirdos,” Dalton Derkson says, cutting to the chase. “Like, complimentary! Right?”

During the open mic, fellow VIU student Cynthia deConinckSmith read a story about the satisfaction of self-degloving. (Feel free to not Google what that means.)

Dalton Derkson and Jesslyn Derkson both explode into approval when I bring it up, all sunny smiles as they chime, “Yes! Exactly!”

When I ask what inspired the birth of a square house over a bookstore or something a little more stationary, Jesslyn says, “You kind of saw it today. It’s that interactive community feeling. This is a room anybody can come in [and share.]”

As an incentive to sign up for the open mic, everyone who wrote their name down on the sheet was automatically entered into the lucky draw. They could either win a collection of zines or two books by W.H. Drummond. Turns out, no incentive was needed.

The allotted slots were filled before the event even started, and a few more names squeezed themselves onto the page once it had. Dalton Derkson emceed the event and was forced to put a 3-5 minute cap on speakers. Of the writing shared during the open mic, speakers chose orgasms, maps, or mothers as their subject matter. I have never been so thrilled to be in a room.

Masha Zhaksybek, Creative Writing major at VIU and Non-Fiction Editor in Portal Magazine’s 2026 issue, read her poem “Ode to Jupiter” and had her name drawn for the collection of zines. “I wrote [“Ode to Jupiter”] for my best friend Sophie, who’s here with me today.”

The two of them sit together at a little table right next to the stairs. The table next to her sits Fleming, and the two of them are practically back-to-back. Fleming is locked in a conversation with some other supporter of local art, so Zhaksybek’s words miss her ears. “[Elke and Taylor] just left my heart, genuinely, full of love.”

There was a lot of that going around. The room celebrated everyone brave enough to join the open mic, even the ones with the weirder or grosser stories.

“Writing is for everyone, and reading is for everyone,” Dalton Derkson says. “We’re trying to accommodate that for people in Nanaimo.”

Having done my homework, I ask if that’s where the name for a square house comes from.

“Essentially,” he responds. “It actually came from the television show Cheers. There’s a sign in the back of the bar.”

The sign reads: “this is a SQUARE HOUSE. Please report any un-fairness to the proprietor.” It refers to gambling, but generally speaks to a desire to keep things fair—a quality that Dalton Derkson says the publishing industry in Canada is assuredly not.

“It is a very exclusive world,” he says, speaking to his own experiences. “When you get out to the other end and there’s no one there, you feel like: What’s the point of writing? And that’s one of the saddest things I can think of … someone losing their hobby, their art, their thing that [gives] them joy.”

That’s what brought a square house to life: a love of the written word and a love of the people who write it.

~

Elke Sorensen and I step outside The Vault for some fresh air, and a little relief from the heat that radiates from so many people crammed into one small venue. Sorensen works with me at The Navigator as Associate Media Editor, and has non-fiction works published in Cabin Radio, The Vintage Seeker, and Healthy Debate.

I ask why she chose to read at this event hosted by a square house.

“Because I love reading. It’s so fun to get together and meet people and share your work and build community,” she says.

Dalton Derkson reached out to her after spotting a poem that she posted onto Instagram. “It was kind of like, ‘Instagram poetry.’ I was being kind of ironic about it.”

But Dalton Derkson took her seriously and recognized her as the great poet that she is. To honour that, she read the same series of poems that got her invited to the event in the first place.

Sorensen’s non-fiction piece “Please Do Not Touch The Specimens” was published in the 2025 edition of Portal Magazine, which was all about the wonders of taxidermy. Her long-poem “Goodbye Yellowknife” was even stranger. It was sentimental. More sentimental than anything she’s read in the past. I ask what it was like to read.

“Weird and embarrassing.”

“Good overall? Or just bad?” I ask.

She relents. “It was really good.”

There’s a lot of ways to spread the word. Through Grub Street, it’s spoken into the air and taken home by the ear of every patron. I stuck a recorder in everybody’s face, and played their words back that way. But the written word, what you’re reading in your hands, is my favourite.

“We [wanted to] make sure we had the distro element involved,” Dalton Derkson says.

Being a ‘distro’ means you’re a distributor. The collection of zines that Zhaksybek won were on sale during the event. One was published by a square house, but they also had work by Discordia Review and Horsebroke Press in Ottawa—among others. Because the two have either lived or worked in central or eastern parts of Canada, that is where most of their connections remain. But Dalton Derkson doesn’t see that as a deterrent.

“We’ve got … a Trans-Canada highway of poetry.”

He quips that stamps are less than $2.00, making transit accessible. The poetry community doesn’t tend towards thick hardcovers; poems are usually packaged in homemade zines (which are traditionally made with a single piece of folded paper) or chapbooks, which generally have no more than 40 pages.

Back in the day, CDs were the most widespread collection item. “You would revisit them. You would grow with them. And they would become a part of your life,” Dalton Derkson says. That’s why distributing physical media like zines is so important to them. “Maybe it sticks with you and maybe it’s something that you have and that you can read over and over again.”

“You can get what you’re looking to get out of it. Or not, as the case might be!” Jesslyn Derkson adds on. “And then you can turn around and pass that off to somebody else and they can do the same in return for you.”

I spoke with participants of the open mic and asked what it was like. When I took the stage to read a poem of my own, I lost feeling in my entire body about halfway through. Others said it was really scary, or simply that they liked it. One, with a cool shrug, said that they like supporting local arts.

In 2011, Jesslyn Derkson said in an interview with Rob McLennan that, “If one particular writer or group of writers influences a process that helps shape the direction of a culture then so be it, but I don’t think that anyone can define that as it happens.”

I quote her back to herself over 10 years later, and she breaks into a laugh, surprised to still agree with herself after all this time. “We all are getting something from one another … [That’s why] this is the kind of event that we put on.”

The night ends with us standing around a table with perfectly good seats, a friendly conversation about diarrhea I elected not to transcribe, and a sense of fulfillment that I can hardly put into words.