Description:
In Dancing with an Apocalypse, Tom Titus has assembled a collection of musings in response to the social and environmental upheavals in the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021. He finds inspiration from neighborhood happy hours and solitary escapes into the emerald convolutions of the Oregon Coast Range. Titus traces the eddies of life by engaging with mating newts, a hovering raven, wind in old trees, a decaying house, and sawdust spitting from a portable lumber mill. These writings call for cooperative movement and perseverance and offer hope that end times are only changing times.
Brief description: Tom Titus is a writer, biologist, gardener, grandfather, forager, and free-range philosopher who writes at the messy interface of human experience and the natural world. His latest collection, "Palindrome: Grateful Reflections from the Home Ground," celebrates the emerald ripple of the Pacific Northwest and embraces departed family, raspberry sunrises, imminent storms, and the bloodshot stare of a sharp-shinned hawk. Tom is a key collaborator in an annual multimedia program entitled "The Nature of Gratitude." His wife and cats share their home with him in Eugene, Oregon.
Review Quotes:
"Narrative and lyrical, Dancing with an Apocalypse is part love-letter, part challenge to the spaces we choose to inhabit. Titus is a clear, strong voice at the beginning of the end." Peter Brown Hoffmeister, author of This is the Part Where You Laugh.
"Tom Titus's Dancing with an Apocalypse inhabits the liminal space between what has been (or what we thought it was) and what will be. Titus writes from the many facets of his being: with the engaged and discerning eye of biologist, geneticist, and herpetologist, the heart of son, husband, father and grandfather, the curiosity of explorer, gardener and forager, the courage and dedication of a carpenter, and the mind of poet and analyst. His thirty-four essays explore the fear and frustrations of the abolishment of normalcy in the Covid-induced "end of the world as we know it," and his life and work mirror his adaptation to change. He writes of things from the "before world" like classism and racism that we ought not bring with us to the new world. He throws out useless accumulated junk and erects strong new wood to replace rotting lumber in his beloved family cabin in the Coast Range. He condemns social hate and misunderstanding as he organizes multi-racial and multi-generational family gatherings. He writes of the loss of connections through the pandemic's isolation and shares the reliable and lasting connections between us and our fellow earthlings. Titus's concerns will reflect the readers' own. May we all also reflect his solutions fostering attentiveness, love and connection."
Evelyn Searle Hess, author of Shoulder to Shoulder, Working Together for a Sustainable Future.