About the author

Dennis Monroe Clausen (born November 1, 1943) has been a Professor of American Literature and Creative Writing at the University of San Diego for over half a century and a published author since 1982. His novels, works of nonfiction, poems and essays are set in the small towns of his youth that are struggling to survive. More recent literary works are set in urban areas that seem to be harbingers of some future apocalypse as their growing homeless populations live and often die on the city streets.

Early Life on the prairie

Clausen lived his early life with his family in a small rented farmhouse in the middle of a sparsely populated prairie. The farm was located a few miles south of the town of Alberta, Minnesota, which had a population of less than 200 people. At the age of 3, Clausen moved with his parents and brother Derl to the town of Morris, Minnesota, which had a population of slightly over 4,000 people. All the small towns in the area were struggling to survive, and some were clearly dying. It did not seem like a place that would inspire a young person to develop a literary career. Yet, those experiences and characters in small town America inspired many of Clausen’s literary works.

Family break-up

Clausen’s father Lloyd struggled to find employment in Morris that would pay enough to support his growing family. He eventually found a better paying job as the manager of a service station in Sauk Rapids, Minnesota. Sauk Rapids is a two-hour drive from Morris, and it is located on the other side of the Mississippi River from St. Cloud. Clausen’s mother Arlene and the children stayed behind in Morris. As a disabled woman whose right hip had been severely damaged and left leg shortened by a disease in her infancy, Arlene needed the support of her own brothers and sisters who lived on nearby farms and small towns. Within a year, the long distance marriage failed. In the years that followed, Clausen’s father became in his son’s mind a wandering figure who struggled with relationships and seemed lost and confused. They talked on the telephone, but Lloyd often appeared and disappeared from his son’s life. For many years, regardless of where he was in the spring, Lloyd would return during the opening of the fishing season to take his sons fishing on Big Pelican Lake near Ashby, Minnesota. That was the one thing that never changed, while everything else, especially his father’s many unsuccessful marriages, seemed always to be changing. Clausen struggled to understand the forces that shaped his father’s early life and made it difficult for him to connect with others in his adult life. Author Clausen’s attempts to understand his father eventually resulted in Prairie Son (1999) and Goodbye to Main Street (2016). The books, which were researched and written intermittently for almost four decades, were both accounts of his father’s early life and an attempt by Clausen to understand a man who had always been a mystery to him.

Foster home

For a time in the early 1950s, Clausen’s mother was in and out of the University of Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis. She went through several surgeries to try to repair the hip that had been damaged by the disease that was later diagnosed as skin tuberculosis. Gloria Reitz, one of his mother’s best friends in high school, asked her parents Herman and Alvina Reitz if they would take Derl and Dennis in to live with them while their mother was in the hospital. The Reitzs agreed, and Dennis and Derl lived with them for the next 1 ½ years.

The members of the Reitz family were all avid readers. Herman took Dennis many times to the Carnegie Library so that he could take out books. Dennis fell in love with reading and books. He later credited those trips to the library as one of the most important factors in his later decision to become a writer and author.

A second home in the Carnegie Library

When Clausen’s mother and his siblings were reunited, he remembers remembers the winters of the early 1950s as a series of seemingly endless snowstorms that packed drifting snow almost to the bottom of the window sills in the old rented farmhouse where they lived on the western edge of Morris. The house had been hauled to town from a farm and dumped on top of some concrete blocks with nothing in the way of insulation. In the winter the linoleum-covered floors were almost impossible to walk across without shoes. The small Carnegie Library three blocks away had a huge coal and wood burning stove, and it was much warmer. Clausen spent many winter days reading whatever books were available in the library, while occasionally glancing at the frost-covered windows and feeling the heat coming through the floor grates. The library became like a second home to him. He read many mysteries, but was also introduced to the novels of Willa Cather, Ole Rolvaag and others who wrote about the Midwestern pioneer movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Older library patrons sometimes uttered Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street (1920) in derogatory terms because of his critical views of small towns and the people who lived in them. Lewis grew up in Sauk Centre, a town only an hour drive east of Morris, but Clausen did not read Main Street until later in his life. The library itself, however, played a major role in his fiction. He eventually incorporated it into a number of scenes in his novels about characters clinging to the past as they struggled to keep their small towns alive.

The Pool Hall Classroom

The pool hall, an ancient nineteenth-century structure on Morris’s Main Street, was one of the places where older generations gathered to intermingle with friends and tell their life stories. Clausen skipped weekend catechism classes so many times to listen to those stories in the pool hall that he had to make up Bible study classes in a single weekend if he was to be confirmed. The pool hall eventually provided several major scenes for his later literary works, especially American Tapestry (2020) and The Search For Judd McCarthy (2018)

Morris High School

Clausen acknowledges that he was not the most dedicated student in high school. Some of it was due to issues of domestic violence a stepfather brought into their home. He remembers many sleepless nights while being on guard for any sound that indicated his mother was in distress. The academic courses he was interested in were literature, history and creative writing. He was less interested in science and math. His greater love by far was basketball. However, there were no indoor courts that were open for young people, and the outdoor garage courts were impossible to play on in the winter. The basketball would start to deflate almost as soon as Clausen and his brother Derl stepped out of their home to walk four or five blocks to a neighbor’s home who had a garage court. By the time they arrived at the garage court, the ball had deflated so much it could no longer be dribbled. They improvised a new game that combined football and basketball and needed no dribbling, but it quickly became boring. They finally decided to roll several old, frayed pairs of socks into a ball and use the living room chandelier as the hoop. They practiced for hours, lobbing the ball of rolled-up socks into the chandelier. In spite of the absence of indoor and outdoor basketball courts, Clausen and his brother eventually became captains of their high school basketball teams. Clausen also considered a career as a basketball coach, but the call of a literary life was stronger.

The miracle of an unexpected college education

During Clausen’s junior year in high school, while his family lived on one side of a small duplex, the state of Minnesota established a small branch of the University of Minnesota on the eastern edge of Morris. There were some old buildings that had once housed a school for Native American children. Later it became the West Central School of Agriculture for the sons and daughters of farmers who needed a different schedule because of the planting and harvesting seasons. The state legislature’s decision made it possible for Clausen to attend college at the University of Minnesota, Morris. It was one of several “coincidences” that eventually made a literary career possible.

Living at the La Grande Hotel while attending college

While attending college, Clausen moved into a room at the La Grande Hotel for two years, where he worked as a desk clerk to receive free rent. The La Grande Hotel was anything but “Grande.” It was an old nineteenth century-era brick building weathering on the corner half a block from his home. Clausen later referred to the move as “going away to college.” In the absence of any real retirement homes in the area, the La Grande Hotel had become a residence for elderly retirees with little money who turned their cheap hotel rooms into their permanent homes. Most of them had also outlived their families. From his vantage point behind the front desk, Clausen listened to them as they sat in the lobby, played cards and reminisced about days gone by. Later he realized those stories were instrumental in shaping his literary career. Many of the small town character types Clausen created in The Search For Judd McCarthy (2018), The Sins of Rachel Sims (2018), and American Tapestry (2020) were first inspired by those permanent hotel dwellers who told their stories a few feet away from where he was sitting in the hotel lobby.

College Basketball

Clausen and his brother Derl played basketball for Coach Jim Gremmels at the University of Minnesota, Morris. Gremmels was also a Professor of American Literature. Gremmels’s dual roles as basketball coach and professor influenced Clausen deeply. In a letter Gremmels wrote years later and shared with others, he described two former students as examples of how the “intellectual heat” applied to students in college classrooms can transform them. He used Clausen as one example, describing him as a “young man whose favorite growing up spot was the old pool hall on North Atlantic Avenue. From a broken family with little resources, he stayed in town to go to college, primarily to play basketball and shoot pool.” Clausen and his brother Derl both became captains of the University of Minnesota, Morris, basketball teams, thus repeating what they had accomplished in high school. Author Clausen was eventually voted into the Cougar Hall of Fame in 1997.

Blending literary and teaching careers

After completing a master’s degree in American Studies at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Clausen made the decision in 1967 to pursue a doctorate at the University of California, Riverside. Both programs grounded Clausen in classic American literature and related academic disciplines. They also enabled him to integrate popular literary genres with classical authors and literary works in his own writing and teaching. At UCR, Clausen received a teaching assistantship and was required to teach a literature and writing class. It would be the first of many classes he taught over the next half century that blended his writing and teaching careers. Every year after he started teaching at the University of San Diego in 1972, he taught writers like Sinclair Lewis, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Edgar Lee Masters, Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather and others who helped create a small town genre in American literature. In time, Clausen blended his personal small town experiences with the literary works of those writers who had created the small town literary genre earlier in the twentieth century.

Mixing literary genres in writing fiction

Clausen’s fifty-plus years of teaching the authors who helped establish the foundations of American literature also created a multi-generic literary component in his own writing style. He mixes genres more freely than most writers because he has taught many of these genres for the same period of time. When he teaches a certain author, he often experiments with writing a short piece in the style and voice of the author. Those short writing exercises are not for publication. They are used to help him get into the inner spirit of the literary works he will teach. Clausen concedes that he understands the wisdom of staying within a specific genre for marketing purposes and book sales. However, he also acknowledges that a half century of exposure to many different genres and writing styles makes it difficult for him to avoid the temptation to mix genres.

An unexpected best-selling novel

Clausen’s first published novel was inspired by a biological grandfather he had never met. His father Lloyd was adopted by a farm family to be more of an unpaid laborer than a son. However, before he died of cancer in 1980, Lloyd was able to learn the identities of his biological father Judd Thompson and biological mother Clara Moseng. Lloyd failed in his attempts to establish a relationship with them and their families. Author Clausen became intrigued by stories of his biological grandfather, who some people in west central Minnesota remembered as “an unbeaten amateur wrestler.” Clausen transformed that relative, who died in a construction accident in the late 1940s, into one of the main characters in the novel that became Ghost Lover (1982). Much to Clausen’s surprise, it became a best-selling novel and received strong reviews in publications like Publishers Weekly (February 12, 1982). The review described the novel as “an expertly written thriller . . . that beautifully evokes the feeling of small town dying." Later, the novel was retitled and republished as The Search for Judd McCarthy (2018), a title Clausen much preferred.

Deaths in the family

Clausen’s brother Derl died in his sleep in March of 1972 at the age of 29. The cause of death was not certain, but the coroner suspected it was due to an adverse reaction to a prescription drug. With his brother’s death, author Clausen lost the one person he had been closest to for the first two decades of his life. His father Lloyd died of lung cancer in October of 1980 in Houston, Texas. In the months before he died, author Clausen called virtually every day to check on him and to gather notes on the book he planned to write someday about his father’s life. He also traveled to Houston and was with his father for three months before he died on October 31, 1980. Clausen’s own birthday was the very next day.

Revisiting the farms where his father lived as a boy

After Lloyd died, Clausen continued to research his father’s early life. Although his teaching and writing careers were centered in Southern California, he often returned to west central Minnesota to familiarize himself with the rented farms his father had lived on as a boy. Most of the old farm buildings where his father had lived and toiled for his adoptive family had collapsed and were being reclaimed by the relentless forces of nature that created the prairie thousands of years earlier. A few of the buildings on neighboring farms were still intact, although they too were gradually melting back into the prairie. Clausen walked those fields and country roads the way his father had walked them in the 1920s and 1930s. These visits to the farms on which his father had lived, and the fields where he had labored for his adoptive family, enabled him to identify more deeply with his father’s early life. In time, the “sense of place” that author Eudora Welty said was so instrumental in writing fiction or nonfiction became very real to him.

Clausen’s father’s best friend in his youth provides the catalyst for Prairie Son

In the 1980s, shortly after his father’s death, Clausen received a letter from Delores Cudrio Hampton. Delores was also an adopted child and his father’s most faithful friend and confidante throughout their youths and teenage years. Author Clausen told her of his attempts to engage more fully with his father’s early life story. After several exchanges of letters, Delores invited him to meet her at the Los Angeles airport where she had a connecting flight. They had a short, but warm and friendly meeting. Afterwards, as she was about to board the airplane back to her temporary home in Scotland, Delores handed Clausen an old album of photographs she had taken during her own childhood and teenage years on the prairie. Lloyd, who she clearly loved, was in many of those photographs. In the years that followed before her death in 1995, Clausen and Delores often spoke on the phone and during visits after she moved to Bakersfield, California. The photographs she gave Clausen were used in Prairie Son (1999). Before Delores died, she also authored a brief essay about her trip to California shortly before World War II started. In the last years of her life, she was also the catalyst that made it possible for Clausen to write the story of his father’s early years on the Minnesota prairie.

The gift of dyslexia

For much of his career at the University of San Diego, Clausen worked with many students who had learning difficulties and challenges. He also had close relatives who struggled with dyslexia. Those experiences motivated him to write My Christmas Attic (2007, 2018), a story about a young boy whose “gift of dyslexia” often enabled him to see the future more clearly than the adults in his life. The setting of Julian, California, in the mountains east of San Diego is another small town, albeit a place very different from the flat prairielands of Clausen’s youth and earlier fiction. The characters were similar in some ways to the small town characters in Clausen’s earlier literary works. However, when young Jake Jennings travels with his mother to March Air Force Base near Riverside, California, to periodically check on the status of their missing-in-action husband and father, they enter a world deeply involved in the Korean War. Jake eventually escapes into the attic of their home to create a “forever Christmas World,” and the attic becomes the most important “place” where the action occurs in the story.

An evolving sense of storytelling

When Clausen published Storytelling as Art and Craftsman ship in 2019, it was a compilation of the many lessons he learned during his long teaching and publishing careers. He acknowledges the authors and literary works that were most instrumental in shaping his own literary style. The following are some of the most important tips he learned from those authors, or through trial and error, and passes on to his own students:

The importance of “place or setting” in telling the story

He often cites examples from American literature. They include the Nebraska prairie in Willa Cather’s My Antonia; the Mississippi River in Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; the Pequod whaling ship in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and many other works of fiction and nonfiction in our national literature. Like Eudora Welty, Clausen stresses that the sense of place is not only where the story occurs. It also establishes the major themes and motifs for everything that happens in the story.

The “place” where the reader stands in the story

Clausen emphasizes the importance of writers finding a character readers can identify with on a deeper, more emotional level. Often the best points of view are characters who are deeply stressed and ambiguous about the challenges they face in life. He cites many examples from American literature that have inspired his own writing. Huck Finn is deeply conflicted about his love for the slave Jim and his upbringing, which taught him slavery is acceptable even in the Bible. Nick Carraway, the narrator of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, is simultaneously enchanted and appalled by the corruption and greed of America’s wealthy classes. Jim Burden, the narrator of Cather’s My Antonia, treasures his earlier memories of life on the Nebraska prairie, and yet as an adult he works as a lawyer for a railroad line that is destroying the few pristine wilderness areas left in the West. These complicated characters with unresolved issues are far more compelling than characters who are untroubled and more certain about how they view life.

Structuring stories using screenplay outlines

Clausen encourages his students and those who attend his workshops to write a story first as a screenplay, and then use the screenplay as an outline to write a novel. He stresses that after the screenplay is completed, the writer will have more control of the main plot of the story. It is then much easier to explore and enrich the minor characters and subplots. Perhaps most importantly, the writer will have developed a deeper sense of the “inner spirit” of the story before the first sentence of the novel is written.

Writing effective dialogue

Clausen encourages writers to write their dialogue as though it is to be used in “performance,” not “silently read” on the printed page. In this sense, he agrees with authors like Mark Twain, who read virtually everything he wrote to an audience before publishing it. Michael Lewis, whose books like The Blind Side and The Big Short have been adapted into successful films, follows a similar practice in writing his fiction. In interviews, Lewis stresses that he never publishes anything before reading it out loud to an audience. He wants the dialogue to sound as authentic as performance dialogue on stage or in films. Clausen discusses these and other authors and their writing strategies in Storytelling as Art and Craftsmanship (2019).

Developing characters in poetry first

Clausen learned early in his writing career that he could develop stronger characters if he developed some of them first in short poems and then in novels. Often written in sonnet form, the poems utilized the rhythms, tones and other elements of poetry that brought the characters to life at a deeper level than mere description. Clausen was especially inspired by the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935), whose poems were often about the idiosyncratic characters who inhabited the fictional community of Tilbury Town. Clausen used his own poetic descriptions to help develop some of the characters in his novels. He later revised and published the poems in small town, regional and university poetry journals. He eventually compiled and published them in American Tapestry (2020).

More deaths in the family and an evolving sense of American small town culture

Clausen’s mother Arlene died of acute leukemia in March of 1995. She never left Morris, where she could live among relatives and friends. Clausen’s sister Renee died of breast cancer in August of 2000. Like her mother, Renee never considered living anywhere other than the small town where she was born. Patricia and Beverly, his other sisters, continued to live most of their lives in Morris or nearby towns. All three of his sisters worked to support efforts to control domestic violence against women and children. After raising her own large family in a home without indoor plumbing, Clausen’s grandmother Anna Anderson did volunteer work for a retirement home where many of the elderly retirees were much younger than her. These relatives and many others deepened his sense of small town culture. They created a more sympathetic, albeit idiosyncratic sense of small town characters than the ones portrayed by Sinclair Lewis in Main Street (1920) in nearby Sauk Centre, Minnesota.

Growing awareness that his father’s story was shared by other adopted children

When Clausen published Prairie Son in February of 1999, he thought the book would have some regional or perhaps statewide interest. He did not realize how many families had been affected by the practice of adopting children from orphanages and using them as an unpaid source of labor. Then, during a book tour in Minnesota in the summer of 1999, members of the audience came up to him after the presentation and said, “We had a similar story in our family.” Some of these descendants told him about the Orphan Trains that transported a parent or grandparent from New York to the Midwest, where they were adopted on the train tracks. Some were treated well in their adoptive homes. Many were not. Clausen eventually learned that the Orphan Trains from 1850-1929 had transported 350,000 children from the orphanages in the east to be adopted off these train tracks. Although Clausen’s father was not one of the children who was sent out west on the Orphan Trains—his was a private church adoption—his story parallels their experiences. Clausen came to realize from the letters he received after the publication of Prairie Son that his father’s story was shared by many other families.

Completing his father’s journey

In the months after the publication of Prairie Son, Clausen received letters from other readers with connections to people in the story. One letter stood out. It was a letter from one of Clausen’s biological grandfather Judd Thompson’s grandchildren, who remembered vague stories about an adopted child in their family tree. The letter set up a meeting with Clausen’s family and Judd Thompson’s grandchildren and other descendants. That letter was followed almost immediately by letters from Lloyd’s biological mother Clara Moseng’s side of the family tree. It also resulted in a series of meetings and eventually an invitation to include Lloyd’s family in the Moseng family genealogy that was published several years later. The book Prairie Son had completed Lloyd’s journey to find a place where he belonged. Clausen later published Goodbye to Main Street (2016) to share the many insights and extended family connections Prairie Son had generated after its publication in 1999.

A visit to an obscure cemetery produces a shift in literary genres

For years after the publication of Prairie Son in 1999, Clausen continued to write and publish essays on various topics, a newspaper column and other literary works. In the early years of the twenty-first century, he developed a strong desire to write an urban mystery. A city tour with a visiting friend soon made him aware of San Diego’s growing homeless population. He researched the issue of homelessness and learned of San Diego’s Evergreen Cemetery, where 4,000 poor and homeless people are buried in unmarked graves. When he visited the cemetery, he realized it was an overgrown weed field. As he stood in the middle of the cemetery, surrounded by indentations in the ground where the wooden coffins had collapsed, those forgotten souls seemed almost to speak to him of other stories that needed to be told. He was reminded of the lonely people who lived in rented rooms and gathered in the La Grande Hotel lobby to share their stories when he worked as a desk clerk. The difference was that the elderly retired residents in the La Grande Hotel had a place to sleep and the companionship of others. The urban mystery he had planned was transformed into a trilogy—The Accountant’s Apprentice (2018), The Return Of The Fifth Horseman (2022), and Apocalypse In Our Time 2024)—that probed the more metaphysical and philosophical issues that shape human destinies.

Returning to Big Pelican Lake

During his visits back to Minnesota, Clausen often returned to Big Pelican Lake, the one place where his father seemed to be most at peace with himself. Clausen never fished the lake again. But he would stand on the shore, often near the collapsed bait house, and watch the water flow gently over the rocks and pebbles, and then retreat back into the lake. He remembered an earlier time when the anticipation of going out on the lake to fish with his father and brother felt like an exciting adventure. He still feels their presence as he watches the water lap gently over the rock-covered shoreline.

Half a century as a college professor

During the years that Clausen was writing and publishing novels and works of nonfiction, he continued to teach American literature and creative writing classes at the University of San Diego. Many of the giants who created America’s early literary tradition became in his mind intimate acquaintances that helped shape his own literary efforts. Clausen introduces them to his students as “my old friends.” Those old friends continue to influence the way he teaches and writes literature.

Publications

Novels

• Apocalypse In Our Time (2024)
• The Return of the Fifth Horseman (2022)
• The Accountant’s Apprentice (2018)
• The Sins Of Rachael Sims (2018)
• The Search For Judd McCarthy (2018)
• My Christmas Attic (2007, 2018)
• Ghost Lover (1982)

Non-fiction and creative nonfiction

• Storytelling as Art and Craftsmanship (2019)
• Goodbye to Main Street (2016)
• Prairie Son (1999)

Poetry

• American Tapestry (2020)

Essays published in Psychology Today online

• “Reading Scores Plummet: Should We Be Surprised?” (02/05/2025)
• “Has Oxford Exposed Our Time as the Age of Brain Rot?” (12/06/2024)
• “What is Lost When Literature Is Not Taught in Our Schools?” (10/28/2024)
• “Shrinkflation, Downsizing and the Destruction of Trust” (09/04/2024)
• “Do We No Longer Own Our Own Possessions?” (06/09/2024)
• “Melville, Moby Dick, and Worldwide Authoritarianism” (05/26/2024)
• “Is the Arc of Dysfunctionalism Accelerating?” (03/25/2024)
• “Is Dysfunctionalism the New Norm in Modern Life?” (01/10/2024)
• “Are the Humanities in a War for Survival?” (10/22/2023)
• “Are Attacks on Literature Signs of Cultural Decline?” (08/27/2023)
• “The Librarian’s Role in Education Is Vital” (06/20/2023)
• “The Battle of the Bots: Who Wins, Who Loses?” (02/13/2023)
• “Do Americans Ignore the Patterns of History?” (03/31/2023)
• “Banned Books Enable Us to See Life Through a New Lens” (11/29/2022)
• “When Political Language Becomes a Lethal Weapon” (09/11/2022)
• “The Puritans are Back: Did They Ever Leave?” (06/29/2022)
• “Policing Classroom Language Stifles Teaching” (04/07/2022)
• “Can a Boy in a Wheelchair Teach Us How to Live?” (01/16/2022)
• “The Folly of a Fully Computerized World” (11/10/2021)
• “What if an Apocalypse is Now the New Normal?” (09/02/2021)
• “Is Hyper-Individualism Undermining the Social Contract?” (06/22/2021)
• “When a Homeless Man Refuses to Give Up” (04/13/2021)
• “Should We Ignore or Embrace Our Mortality?” (02/06/2021)
• “Lost Soul with a Moral Compass” (11/23/2020)
• “Finding Hope in Hopeless Times” (09/03/2020)
• “Reevaluating Literature as an Academic Subject” (06/09/2020)
• “Will Coronavirus Permanently Change Higher Education?” (04/03/2020)
• “Cellphone Addictions: Nuisance or Serious Threats” (01/23/2020)
• “Do Cellphone and Social Media Create Superficial Thinking?” (11/02/2019)
• “Can Literature Help Create Empathy?” (08/06/2019)
• “Wilder’s Our Town Soothes an Anxious Nation” (05/21/2019)
• “Stereotyping Small Town America” (03/15/2019)
• “A Longing for Christmases Past” (12/24/2018)
• “Public Shaming of Women: An Ancient Purging Ritual” (09/21/2018)
• “The Second Self in Literature and Psychology” (09/14/2018)
• “The Search for Identity in Literature and Life” (08/16/2018)

Recent op-eds published in the San Diego Union-Tribune

• “Photographer Dan Rios Was Revered for his Artistry” (01/09/2024)
• “On Artificial Intelligence’s Alarming Arrival in Class” (09/20/2023)
• “How Income Inequality Is Driving the Nation’s Homeless Crisis” (10/27/2022)
• “Huck Finn still has something to impart to us today” (11/29/2021)
• “Address National Teacher Shortage” (04/06/2021)

Op-eds published as columnist for North County Times (2005—2009)

• 120 biweekly op-eds on a wide range of issues in education, literature, politics, small town and urban culture and other topics were published from 2005—2009.

Selected podcasts and interviews

• “Apocalypse in Our Time,” Author Dennis M. Clausen on the Sunbury Press Books Show, July 10, 2024.
  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bookspeak/2024/07/17/apocalypse-in-our-time-author-dennis-clausen-on-the-sunbury-press-books-show
• “Dennis Clausen, The Inner spirit of Story and Soul of Literature. Can Art Save Us?” March 14, 2024
  https://canartsaveus.podbean.com/e/the-inner-spirit-of-story-and-soul-of-literature/
• “Author Dennis Clausen Returns to the Brown Posey Press Show, January 1, 2023.
  https://www.blogtalkradio.com/bookspeak/2023/01/23/author-dennis-clausen-returns-to-the-brown-posey-press-show

San Diego Festival of Books, presentations and awards

• “The Accountant’s Apprentice Trilogy” presented at the University of San Diego’s Humanities Center series on “Challenges of City Life” (2025)
• “The Return Of The Fifth Horseman” presented at the San Diego Festival of Books, 2024.
• “The Accountant’s Apprentice” presented at the San Diego Festival of Books 2021.
• Prairie Son selected by the editorial staff of Minnesota Magazine (July/August 1999) as one of “five favorite books” written by University of Minnesota faculty and alumni from 1998‑1999
• Mid-List Press “First Series Creative Nonfiction Winner” for Prairie Son (1997)

Review excerpts, informal footnotes and biographical information

1. The letter from Jim Gremmels regarding how he recruited author Clausen out of the Morris Pool Hall to play basketball at the University of Minnesota, Morris, is framed and hanging from the wall of author Clausen’s home office.
2. Introduction to Welty’s short story “A Worn Path” in Fictions, edited by Joseph T. Trimmer and C. Wade Jennings, p. 1207. Welty is often recognized as the writer who values “place” above all other literary techniques.
3. “This expertly written thriller, a kind of Stephen King—Ross Macdonald hybrid (and in a class with either) beautifully evokes the feeling of a small town dying—its buildings, its streets and, most of all, its lost souls,” Publishers Weekly review of Ghost Lover, February 12, 1982. p. 96.
4. ”Ghost Lover by Dennis M. Clausen (Bantam), Number 13, Paperback Best Sellers,” The Book Review, Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1982.
5. Hampton, Delores Cudrio, “Route 66 and Beyond,” The 40s A Time for War and a Time for Peace, Stevens County Historical Society, 1995.
6. “Story passed on from father to son written with flair,” The Forum newspaper article on Prairie Son (April 25, 1999).
7. ”Did you ever read a book so good you didn’t want it to end?” Pioneer Press review of Prairie Son (April 18, 1999).
8. ”A painful yet ultimately uplifting biographical journey,” Booklist review of Prairie Son (February 15, 1999).
9. “For consideration in the Biography category of the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, a judge has requested Prairie Son by Dennis M. Clausen published by Mid-List Press.” Letter received from Tom Crouch, Administrative Coordinator nominating Prairie Son for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, April 24, 1999.
10. “An archetypal account of Depression-era hardship. A testament to one boy’s heroic, if flawed, struggle to maintain his humanity in the face of overwhelming odds.” Publishers Weekly review of Prairie Son (February 1999).
11. “Truly memorable. The almost atonal language typical of the era takes on a rich descriptive quality, which makes this text deeply lyrical as well as historical.” ForeWord Magazine review of Prairie Son (February, 1999).
12. “Michael Lewis Interview,” Writer’s Digest (January 2019)
13. “A screaming success . . . a literary feast . . . charismatic appeal", Chanticleer Book Review of The Accountant’s Apprentice.
14. “The Accountant’s Apprentice is a book that captures us with a crime and then, in Dostoevsky fashion, takes us into the minds of its characters. It’s a twisting and turning narrative that examines the human form.” NetGalley.com review of The Accountant’s Apprentice.
15. “A fascinating puzzle hunt like The DaVinci Code—only with much higher stakes . . . Justin’s journey to hope and just a bit of enlightenment will keep readers guessing until the very last page—and after.” Chanticleer Book Reviews of The Return Of The Fifth Horseman.
16. Apocalypse In Our Time a “Best Book” and “Spotlighted” selection as one of top 5 thrillers reviewed by Chanticleer Book Reviews.
17. “A brilliant novel about a young dyslexic child who wants Christmas to last forever,” NetGalley.com review of My Christmas Attic.
18. “My Christmas Attic can be appreciated as a classical saga with cinematic quality that speaks of broader possibilities,” NetGalley.com review of My Christmas Attic.
19. “Orphan Trains offered New York waifs a new life in West,” The San Diego Union-Tribune (April 30, 2000.)