Dennis M. Clausen

Justin Moore returns in this final book of the trilogy as the Director of the East Side Rescue Mission, a shelter for homeless people in San Diego. The broken human beings he experiences every day in the shelter eventually convince him the planet Earth is under siege from some powerful apocalyptic force.

Angelina Christine, the young artistic savant he rescued from the streets, continues to provide hope for all those who come to the shelter.

One day Justin receives a call to pick up a homeless man from the downtown bus depot. When Justin arrives, he learns he is picking up a catatonic wheelchair-bound man a depot employee has named “Levi”.

Justin soon questions whether Levi is A. C., his former mysterious employer returning in a new human form.

While Levi remains unresponsive, shadowy figures began following him. Justin ponders whether his mysterious new resident may have come as a vanguard on behalf of powerful violent forces to help the human race self-destruct.

From the broken humanity he sees every day in his homeless shelter, Justin Moore becomes convinced that a mysterious Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse is preparing a demonic army for a final assault on the human race.

He experiences that threat directly as a sinister force tries to penetrate the protective walls of the shelter to destroy young artistic savant Angelina Christine before she can complete her exquisitely crafted crayon drawings of the homeless.

Justin soon hears the voice of his dead former employer A. C., speaking to him from beyond the grave and warning him that “End Times” are near.

Justin Moore witnesses a crime he believes he might have prevented. The incident undermines his mental health, and he moves into a small, rundown apartment in San Diego where he ponders his life’s mission.

One day he spots a note advertising a position as a driver for a wheelchair-bound resident of the same apartment. He answers the ad and is introduced to an elderly man who identifies himself as “A. C., an accountant for an international business firm.”

Justin soon questions whether his new employer might be involved in illegal activities or something even more mysterious.

My Christmas Attic is a feel-good, plot- and character-driven short novel that appeals to audiences nostalgic for a time in our history when there was a greater sense of shared national purpose.

It was written specifically for dyslexic children who often feel ostracized at school because of their struggles to read, but its appeal can be shared by children (and adults) of all ages.

Rachel Sims, a young Midwestern farm wife, disappears in 1952 under mysterious circumstances while apparently on her way to meet with a man who is not her husband.

After the death of her mother twenty-two years later, Laura Fielding, a graduate student with a bonding disorder and a history of broken relationships, discovers that her family may have been living under stolen identities. She also has vague memories and dreams that are unconnected to anything she remembers from her early childhood experiences.

With the help of psychiatrist Ned Finley, an eccentric researcher who studies human memories, she attempts to solve the mystery of her lineage. Laura eventually learns that her past may be connected to the disappearance of Rachel Sims.

Although the townspeople believe Rachel was an immoral woman who abandoned her husband for a better life, Laura suspects the real reasons for the young farm wife’s disappearance might be found in her own early life memories.

In the fall of 1926, itinerant laborer Judd McCarthy disappears with a company payroll while traveling between two small towns in the Midwest.

Thirty-three years later, lawyer Joel Hampton thinks he is going insane. Psychiatrist Ned Finley, who becomes involved in the case, believes that Joel’s problems defy traditional psychological explanations. As Joel’s outbursts steadily worsen, Finley becomes convinced that his patient is being possessed by the spirit of a violent man who once lived in Carver County.

Finley journeys to the small town of Danvers, where he learns of a man who disappeared in 1926 while transporting a company payroll.

As Finley struggles to learn what happened to Judd McCarthy, and why his spirit seemingly lives on in Joel Hampton, his own life is threatened by some menacing presence in the small town.

Told through the perspective of the author's father, Prairie Son is the true story of a boy who was adopted out of an orphanage in the early 1920s and raised on a Midwestern farm. Lloyd Clausen endures the Great Depression, drought years, and spirit-crushing poverty as he attempts to reconnect with his biological parents.

Published in 1999, Prairie Son won the First Series Creative Nonfiction Award that same year. Dave Woods, former VP of the National Book Critics Circle, wrote that the book attracted “all manner of national attention, a consummation devoutly to be wished for by a small publisher.” Prairie Son was also nominated for several national book awards, and the University of Minnesota (Clausen's alma mater) voted it one of the top five books published by an alumnus.

Goodbye to Main Street, a family memoir and sequel to Prairie Son, is one journey divided into two parts. The first half depicts Clausen’s life in a small prairie town. Clausen describes how his adopted father wandered into and out of his life and was, as his mother put it, “still searching for a place where he fit in.”

The second half of Goodbye to Main Street explores family mysteries and the legacy of previous generations. These mysteries, first explored in the prequel Prairie Son, motivate Clausen to complete his father’s journey. He researches and connects with Lloyd’s biological families in ways his father was never able to do. Clausen begins to find answers to the many unanswered questions in his family history.

American Tapestry: The Poetry of Main Street is the final book in a unique trilogy author Dennis M. Clausen started writing in the early 1980s and completed almost four decades later. Prairie Son (1999), a work of creative nonfiction and the first book in the trilogy, is the story of the author’s father, Lloyd Clausen, who was adopted in the early 1920s to be a farm worker and not a son. Goodbye to Main Street (2016), the second book in the trilogy, is a “Family Memoir and Sequel to Prairie Son” in which author Clausen narrates his own efforts to complete his father’s search for his biological parents and their descendants. American Tapestry, a book of poems about small town characters in the middle of the last century, completes this multi-genre trilogy. Many of these poems were inspired by people Clausen knew and wrote about in Prairie Son and Goodbye to Main Street.