You Had No Idea What You Were Doing, Dad

Author Ellen E. Sutherland standing near "Area 51"

There are moments in a life that become portals. You don't always recognize them when they happen. They look ordinary — a Saturday afternoon, a bookstore, someone handing you something and saying, I think you'll like this one. I did.

That was my dad.

I wasn't a reader. My mother had her own ideas about what I should be reading, and none of them called to me. I was young and impressionable and not particularly interested in being converted to anything. And then my dad, without ceremony or fanfare, handed me a book.

And just like that, a door fell open that I didn't know was there.

Pirates. Spies. Vikings sailing across impossible seas. Time travelers. Detectives piecing together what the world refused to say plainly. Thieves with better moral codes than the people chasing them. Aliens arriving without apology. Book after book, he handed them to me with the same quiet confidence: I think you'll like this one. I did.

He was always right.

I couldn't put them down. That's still true. I read until the words become the dark, and then I start again in the morning. What my dad understood — maybe without even knowing he understood it — is that a book isn't an escape. It's an expansion. Every story he handed me made the world larger. Rocks stopped being rocks and became something that had a history. Strangers became people with interior lives as complicated as my own. The past stopped being finished and started being present — still breathing, still unresolved, still worth visiting.

He broadened every horizon I could see, one paperback at a time.

Here's what he couldn't have predicted: I started writing my own.

And if you've read the Jamie Poole Books, you already know what I put in them. Time travelers, naturally. Vikings. Thieves. Spies. Detectives. A sword that moves through Time. Ancient worlds pressing up against modern ones. And yes — don't think I forgot — aliens. Because what my dad taught me, without ever sitting me down to explain it, is that you can have everything all at once if you have enough books. If you have enough imagination. If someone, once, trusted you with a story and said — here. This one's for you.

I created The Time Travelers Tarot, because I saw a portal emerge from those books. Something more. Something that was its own thing. Perhaps you can see why I'd make a deck time travel themed and how that works effortlessly in tarot.

I write the books I write because of a man who handed me a portal and called it a paperback.

You had no idea what you loosed on this earth, Dad.

But thank you. For the bookstore. For the stack that kept growing. For trusting a kid who wasn't sure she was a reader yet with stories that proved she absolutely was.

You gave me a gift greater than gold.

And I'm still opening it.

Ellen E. Sutherland is the author of the Jamie Poole Books series, creator of The Time Travelers Tarot, and the musician behind Jamie Poole's Coastal Chronicles. She writes from Nova Scotia, where the past has a habit of showing up uninvited — which suits her perfectly.