Dancing with an Apocalypse

An Early Review

October is my favorite month. It is also challenging. If September is the silent windup, then October is the pitch, a wild slider I sometimes struggle to handle, an intensity of changing trajectories that require focus in every moment. Dry champaign days are interspersed with the first storms blustering in from the Pacific. Brown meadows blush back to green. Chanterelle mushrooms wriggle from wet needle duff. In my world, October carries a deadline—every being knows in their deep-down self that rain and darkness lurk beneath the near horizon.

My latest book, Dancing with an Apocalypse, will print sometime in late November. Birthing a book is a lot like living in October. Exciting. Tumultuous. Full of focus and deadlines. And terrifying. Yes, terrifying. Because now I need to promote it, and promotion is for extroverts. Reality check—half the time I’m not sure who I am, but I will always know that I am not an extrovert! Ursula Le Guin put it well: Extroverts rule. This is rather odd when you realize that about nineteen writers out of twenty are introverts. But a writer's job is ingoing. Thank you, Ursula.

My introverted heart is beyond grateful for this pre-review of Dancing with an Apocalypse by Evelyn Searle Hess, author of the terrific new book Shoulder to Shoulder, Working Together for a Sustainable Future (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021).

“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.”

Please share wildly and widely!