Bøger af Dennis M Clausen

Storytelling as Art and Craftsmanship examines the elements of storytelling in films and traditional creative writing genres. Dennis M. Clausen demonstrates that screenwriters and creative writers have much to teach one another. Screenwriters are masters of structure, whereas novelists are masters of voice and other elements of storytelling. Citing examples from screenplays, films, classical literature, drama, and even historical stories that live on in our national memories, Clausen examines the common grounds that unite these stories. He demonstrates that storytellers in all genres are both artists who engage in spontaneous and organic decision-making, but also craftsmen who shape, anticipate, and structure their stories for maximum dramatic effect. Classroom-tested exercises are also included at the end of each chapter.

Prairie Son is the true story of a boy who was adopted out of an orphanage in the early 1920's and raised on a Midwestern farm to be more of a worker than a son for his adoptive family. The story is told through the point of view of Lloyd Clausen, the author's father. Lloyd survived the Great Depression, drought years, and spirit-crushing poverty. On his adoptive parents' farm, Lloyd was denied basic dental care, an education, decent clothing except for what he bought with his own trapping money, and support for his emerging singing talents. He was also left at home or on the shore when other fathers took their sons fishing or to community outings. When his adoptive mother made it clear that she did not even want him around, the parental void in Lloyd's life was filled by a hired man and a huge police dog named Buster. Ivar, the hired man, taught Lloyd the many skills he would need to survive later in life, and Buster was his constant companion and protector. Delores, another adopted child who lived on a neighboring farm and had a mysterious past, was his other companion and protector. The friendship the two adopted children shared eventually turned into youthful, adolescent love until fate separated them. Yet, Lloyd survived and eventually located his biological parents through a series of extraordinary coincidences and the assistance of others who sympathized with his plight and helped him find his ancestral roots. When Prairie Son was first published in 1999, it became somewhat of a national, statewide, and regional publishing sensation. Dave Woods, Past Vice-President of the National Book Critics Circle, wrote that Prairie Son, the winner of the 1999 First Series Creative Nonfiction Award, 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 voted it one of the five most favorite books published in 1999 by a University of Minnesota alumnus. Since it was first published in 1999, Prairie Son has become a voice for many other children who were adopted to be workers and later struggled during their adult years with the legacy of those early life experiences. Goodbye to Main Street, a recently published sequel to Prairie Son, chronicles Lloyd Clausen's son's quest to answer the lingering questions still remaining in his family history and the people who made his own life possible.

American Tapestry: The Poetry of Main Street is the final book in a unique, multi-genre 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. Prairie Son also chronicles his father's search for his birth parents during the Great Depression. The book received considerable national attention for the spotlight it placed on the practice of adopting children to be workers and not sons or daughters in their adoptive homes. 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. Others are characters who could be found in any small town earlier in our nation's history.

Goodbye to Main Street, a family memoir and sequel to Prairie Son, is one journey divided into two parts. The first half of Goodbye to Main Street is set in the small prairie town where Dennis M. Clausen, the author and narrator, grew up. It depicts the lives of his original family in the middle of the last century after his parents were divorced. It also describes how his father Lloyd Clausen struggled with relationships and wandered into and out of his life, as his mother put it, "still searching for a place where he fit in." His father seemed to be deeply troubled by things that happened to him earlier in his life, but was reluctant to talk about them. Clausen's mother had more obvious challenges to overcome. She had contacted an unusual disease in her infancy that had destroyed her right hip and shortened her left leg. Sitting was difficult for her, and walking for any distance was impossible. The second half of Goodbye to Main Street is triggered by family mysteries connected to the legacy of previous generations that had shaped the emotional lives of his mother and father. These mysteries, first explored in Prairie Son, motivated Clausen to complete his father's journey by researching and connecting with Lloyd's biological family in ways his father was never able to do. Through these and other sources, Clausen began to find answers to the many unanswered questions in his family history. Who was his biological grandfather, the man he only knew through a faded photograph of a young man in a wrestling pose? Why did his biological grandmother keep her child (his father) hidden on the family farm for several months before giving him up for adoption? Why did his father have three different names before he was one-year old? Who was the mysterious "Aunt" Delores, another adopted child and his father's most enduring love, who occasionally appeared in the author's life? Was his father's failure to develop lasting relationships the result of his early childhood experiences in his adoptive parents' home? By researching and connecting with his biological relatives who shared the same ancestral "roots," Clausen completed his father's journey and learned the circumstances that compelled Lloyd's birth mother to give her child up for adoption. In the process, he exposed the actions of previous generations that had shaped his family history, including the tragic events that had destroyed his mother's hip and leg-and who might have been responsible for it. Goodbye to Main Street is also the sequel to Prairie Son (1999), the recipient of the 1997 First Series Award for Creative Nonfiction. After Prairie Son was published, Clausen was contacted by members of other families who experienced similar adoptions in their histories. While interacting with these families, Clausen realized the practice of adopting children to be workers was far more common than he had previously thought. Like his father, these children who were adopted to labor in their adoptive homes struggled later in life with relationships and feelings of never truly belonging anywhere. In time, Clausen came to realize this was his father's story-and the one he chronicles during his own journey through the pages of Goodbye to Main Street.