It is a delight to share this chapbook, Bluest Tempest, with you— a collection that came from an intimate place, drawn out of the deep color of blue and emotion of grief, dreams, and longing. Bluest Tempest operates out of the superlative of the "deep storm"—blue is a historically significant color in literature, and of course, associated with the sea. I took the liberty to use this color and the landscape of the beach to collect various different poems that dive deeply and strangely into the heart of living and losing, finding and letting go. It is as much about memory as it is about the messages we unexpectedly find floating toward us in life.”

It was by the sea that I first learned the deep art of trusting. My father taught me to be one step ahead of the riptide so that I would not drift away to some dark watery place I did not recognize. Pick a marker, like a bright orange umbrella on the sand, so that when the drifting happens, and it will, you will be able to breaststroke your way back to the place in the sea you began. Bluest Tempest has been composed from these depths of my upbringing to the surface of my emerging adulthood. But in truth, this is not really about my father as much as it is about my mother, in light of a deep realization that I never realized how much time Jesus spent by the sea. He taught by it, withdrew to it, traveled across it, slept on it, and of course, to everyone’s breathtaking amazement, walked on it. He was intimately involved with the ocean. No one has ever been able to measure how God’s love is deeper than the infinite depths of the sea, the ultimate solvent who absorbed my sin thousands of years ago so I could sit by the sea, intimately free. I wanted to write this book because I wanted to create a time capsule of how significant the presence of the sea and the lifestyle surrounding it. I feel particularly apt in being able to write about this being that I have been living along the California Coast for more than two years now, and my study of the environment has been methodical and deep.