USD Magazine, Winter 2000

ALCALA ~ ALMAN AC

In the Name of His Father English professor Dennis Clausen's latest novel tells a very personal tale

affected Clausen's life. During a book tour, he often was surrounded by elderly men with similar tales of being adopted for their value as farmhands. Clausen also was amazed by the number of people who cold him how his father's story made them appreciate their own loving, adoptive parents. Yer the most unexpected was the day he received an e-mail from a woman who wrote: "Guess what?We share the same grandfather." The woman is the granddaughter of the man who fathered Lloyd Clausen. Her family had known about the adoption and unsuccessfully tried to find rheir relatives. It wasn't until she read a review of Prairie Son that she found the missing piece of her family. "This summer my sisters and I had the opportuniry to meet them, and they were wonderful," says Clausen, who is considering writing a follow-up on his father's adult years. "I think my dad would have been happy we found them."

"He had been adopted at 6 months and brought onto a farm more as a worker than a son," Clausen says. "He talked about being neglected, about being held our of school every four of six weeks to work, about how he basically educated himself." Intrigued by his father's tales and his own interest as a writer, Clausen asked his father to write down his memories. After his farher's death from lung cancer, Clausen came across three legal tablets filled with his father's handwriting, stories penned in the final weeks before he died. For years, Clausen re-read the tablets, finally sitting down to rhe computer in 1994. He used a technique that is contro– versial in some circles, "creative nonfiction," in which he adopted his father's voice to tell the story. "Ir was almost like my farher was in my head," he says. "It felt so natural, so it only could be cold in his voice, with his words and with his timing." Met by positive reviews, especially in Minnesota, Prairie Son has profoundly

L ike most writers,

Dennis Clausen had

a story to cell. Ir was the tale of a lonely, abused boy growing up during the Great

- Susan Herold

Depression, a boy selected by his adoptive parents more for his value as a farm laborer than as a beloved son. If he published the story, Clausen knew he had to get it right. Too much was at stake. The boy, after all, was his father. "Writing rhis was one of the most difficult things I've ever done," says Clausen of Prairie Son, published last February by Mid-List Press and a nominee for the 1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. "Bur it also was one of the most fulfill– ing," adds the USD English professor, who joined the faculry in 1972. "I think if my father were alive today, he would have would have cold me I did the best I could." Clausen's father, Lloyd, died alone in 1980 in a tiny Houston, Texas, trailer after a life spent running from his childhood and relationships. Only 6 when his father lefr him, his four siblings and his mother in their native Minnesota, Clausen kept in touch with his father over the years through emotional phone calls in which his father cold tales about growing up in 1930s Alberta, Minn.

Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice to Open June 200 I

The latest designs for the new Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice feature Spanish Renaissance architec– ture in keeping with the University of San Diego's signa– ture style. Construction on the project is expected to begin in late April, with a scheduled opening in June 200 I. The research and teaching facility includes classrooms, interactive meeting and conference areas, and features meditation gardens and a reflecting wave pool.

USD M AGAZ I NE

6