"If the readers care about my characters and understand their struggles—even the ones who aren’t the most admirable—that kind of thing means something to me. Writing just for cheap thrills does nothing for me."

"Looking Humanity in the Eye: Dennis Clausen" by Robert Judge Woerheide

Dennis Clausen is a man of humanity—a throwback to a time when people looked each other in the eye. As a boy, he grew up in a small Minnesota town where he learned to notice people, and to see the human heart in even the most questionable of characters. “I really think there’s something to be said about the (small town) experience,” he tells me. Outside his office, the University of San Diego clock tower chimes its mellow notes into the sunny, January midday. “It makes you see people more vividly—because they stand out against that background.”
     That small town life, that prairie existence, is stamped all over Dennis Clausen and his work. Even the bleak whiteness of those stubborn Minnesota winters—when snow would pile roof-high outside his home, and he would escape through books—effects him today. “You’d look outside,” he recalls, “and you’d see nothing but white. And you had to live with that for five months out of the year. For me, to get a book from the local library and read about a different world was a way of not only escaping, but of surviving.”
     His small town background has provided the foundation for his work as a successful writer. “When you grow up in a small town … you have an anchor that a lot of people don’t have. Main Street is pretty much the same as it was when I was a boy … the basic stage set is still there. I really think there’s something to be said about the small town experience. It makes you see people more vividly—because they stand out against that background.”
     That stage has helped Clausen write two novels, both of which have met with favorable reviews and generous sales. His first book, Ghost Lover, was published in what might be called unusual circumstances—or, as Clausen points out—maybe not so unusual.
     Developed from a screenplay, Clausen’s story was that of a dying small town struggling to survive—and carrying with it a mysterious secret forgotten even by most of the residents. Dennis recounts the story to me: “The publisher wanted to pull it in the direction of a conventional thriller and I wanted to keep it more inline with the idea of small town characters—but that tension was OK. Then we got toward the end of the project and I received a phone call. (The publisher) said, ‘Well, we’ve decided what the title is.’
     “At first I thought ‘do I have some say in this?’ And she said, ‘Well the marketing people have decided that it should be Ghost Lover.’ I don’t remember what my response was—I was trying to keep a relationship with her—but I mean I was appalled at that title. She was pretty emphatic about it. She said one word, ‘Ghost’, would pull in … the gothic horror crowd and the other, ‘Lover’, would pull in readers of romance and you’re going to sell a lot of books. My first thought was, ‘Shouldn’t it have something to do with the story?’”
     It was a lesson Clausen wouldn’t soon forget: go with big publishing houses and you get big publishing house behavior. “The bottom line (for them) is obviously the most important thing,” he explains. “They’re willing to do anything to market a book. I began to think very seriously at that point about whether I wanted to write with the idea of becoming commercially successful, or if I wanted to write books that I could take some pride in.” It isn’t hard to understand why Clausen prefers working with smaller publishing companies these days. “I would probably go to smaller publishing companies almost every time. My experience has been they really want to do quality work.”
     Dennis Clausen looks back on the Ghost Lover fiasco with mixed emotions. “It was such a strange experience because, you know, you live for your first book—you want to take some pride in it. It was in the top 10 paperback originals for a while, but then … if anyone asked me what the title was, I didn’t want to tell them.”
     The screenplay structure worked as a foundation for Ghost Lover. Clausen’s fondness for the screenplay structure separates him from the slew of writers out there today. “A screenplay is a skeleton for a story,” he says. “I (started) to see that skeleton in my own stories. One of the best outlines you can have is a screenplay: it’s not just an outline—a mechanical list of the things you’re going to do—but you’ve actually gone through and felt the spirit of that story all the way through.”
     In such a cinema saturated society, there’s a lot to find appealing about this idea. Many young writers, myself included, find themselves drawn to film as both an artistic medium and as a vehicle for social examination. Working the screenplay into our own writing process seems to hold great promise. I asked Clausen to elaborate.
     “The analogy I always make is, telling a story is kind of like taking a rope and unraveling it. If you don’t have a knot at the end of that rope the whole thing is going to come unraveled. But if you know where that knot is, think of how many ways you can spread that rope out. I’m convinced as I read Shakespeare, for example, I think Shakespeare—I always wondered how he could do this, how he could bring everything together, every little thing that he did in his plays comes together in the end. And I thought, ‘Good Lord, yes: He would have been a screenwriter if he was (alive) in the twentieth or twenty-first century.”
     Aside from his courtship with the screenplay, Dennis Clausen understands that the game is still about writing. He hasn’t forgotten the obligations, the dirty work, the daily grind. “I need the writing everyday. The thing that I love the most about being an author is the actual writing. I love that. I love getting into it. I love having that world I can escape into.”
     His routine puts many of us to shame—especially us night owls. “I like the very early morning hours. I like to get up literally at four o’clock … I have this kind of smug sense of moral superiority when I’m up writing and nobody else is doing anything. And the world just seems like a more understandable place at those hours.”
     It may have been in this manner that Clausen wrote his second book, Prairie Son. The work of creative non-fiction tells the story of Clausen’s father—who was struggling with terminal cancer at the time the book was written. The applicability of the novel is far reaching, and serves to illuminate a problem all too hidden in American history. “I’ve had many people contact me who have similar stories in their families of fathers or grandfathers who were adopted primarily to be workers. They had the same problems that my father had in trying to deal with relationships. The book really had an impact way beyond what I expected.”
     Writing such a personal story had a lasting effect on Clausen. “In trying to find my father’s voice … what I tried to do was recapture that oral storytelling tradition that I associated … mostly with him because he was so good at telling those stories. I think in some ways, by struggling to find his voice I found my own voice.” In fact, the oral tradition has become part of Clausen’s voice, and it guided him in Prairie Son. “It’s how I heard it,” he says.
     The aftermath of Prairie Son was both a surprise, and an emotional verification for Dennis Clausen. Literature endeavors to connect with others, and on a good day, bring something into the light that was hidden in darkness. When Clausen recounts the weeks and months following the release of Prairie Son, it is easy to see his genuine appreciation for the things his book has accomplished. “I had this one experience that kind of pulled it all together for me. This was after I had read an Associated Press article that indicated the orphan trains from, I think it was 1850 to 1929, brought some 350,000 orphaned children to the Midwest to be adopted off trains. And that was almost the same number of Africans brought to America as slaves. Therefore it was a very pervasive thing.
     “Then I had an experience during a talk at the Escondido Library. I had one woman who led her husband up, and he wore suspenders which is very unusual in California, and she said ‘My husband read your book and he wanted to tell you something about it.’ He was looking at the floor and then he looked up at me, and he started to say something, and then all of a sudden he started to cry. And he pulled away from her and walked away. She watched him go and said ‘Well, what he wanted to tell you was that he was not formally adopted, but he was brought onto a farm. He was raised to be more of a worker than a son.’ She said, ‘as you can see those are still very painful memories for him.’ And I thought to myself, ‘You know, I’m glad I wrote this book.’ I think it is helping other people understand those who went through that.”
     The success Prairie Son has enjoyed is certainly well deserved. The story is a very human one, and that is perhaps what makes Clausen’s work so memorable. His stories are populated with humanity in a way reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor. “If the readers care about my characters and understand their struggles—even the ones who aren’t the most admirable—that kind of thing means something to me. Writing just for cheap thrills does nothing for me.”
     For Clausen, an ideal reader is someone who is willing to look inside both the characters and the story—to see the deeper universality. Clausen describes his ideal reader as “someone who is attentive to details, because I like to strip a lot of things away—so that you only have the essential details. (I like) a reader who takes a second look at the characters, at the part of humanity that they think they understand but maybe don’t.”
     Currently, Dennis Clausen is continuing his ambitious work. With two projects underway—one a memoir beginning from the point Prairie Son ends, and the other a work of fiction targeted at dyslexic children—Clausen is a busy man. His work will continue to engage in the conversation of humanity, to act as our conscience. With his help we can all hope to remain thinking individuals, a precious commodity in a world becoming increasingly dumbed-down. A most valuable resource in a society that now contains more writers than readers. “(That’s) scary not just in terms of what kind of literature are we going to have, but what kind of society are we going to have? I think the ability to read is also the ability to discriminate, to understand, to look past the obvious, and to see what’s below the surface.
     “I think a people that can’t do that are a people easily led.”