Every story begins long before the first page is written. Mine began at a family table that stretched across generations — a table filled with silence, survival, stubborn hope, and the small heirlooms that outlasted the people who held them.

My name is Jamie Poole. I time travel. Time doesn't run in a straight line — it gets slippy. That's my word for it and I'm keeping it. What I'm about to tell you is complicated. I'm going to walk you through it the way I walk through everything: one window at a time. One photo. One moment.

Readers ask me a version of this question a lot: "Is Brett Poole based on your dad?" The short answer is no. Brett Poole is not my father. He's an Egyptologist who used to be a paleontologist, for reasons no one — including his own daughter — can get him to explain. He disappeared when Jamie was six months old. He keeps secrets the way other people keep houseplants: quietly, persistently, and with a great deal of guilt he refuses to discuss. None of that is my dad's story.

There is a moment in the Jamie Poole Diaries (Destiny of the Departed) when a character named Nassor the Jackal, clan chief of Larupus, stands in his hall and makes an accusation against his own daughter. He blames her for the death of her mother. He blames her for the weather.

Every family carries its share of generational trauma. Some inherit the pain; others inherit the strength to endure it. Resilience doesn’t erase scars—it simply refuses to make them the center of the story.

A Jamie Poole Diaries character blog — on Za'id, diversity, and what it means to be two people in one body