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.

Kikthawenund is first mentioned in the second book in the series: Resurrection of the Druidess, where Jamie explains to Eliyana how a city was named after her mother’s family. Anderson, Indiana, just south of where Jamie grew up.

This week, I opened a small collection of poems I inherited decades ago and felt something shift. They were written by my great-uncle Harlow, who served in World War II and passed away in the early 1980s. I didn’t know him well, but I remember him kindly. He lived far away—to me as a child at least, in San Francisco. It always felt like more of an idea than a place—and he kept mostly to himself. He never married. He read constantly, especially history and science, and sometim