From the grid to the page
Education and service
Dennis M. Lawler graduated from Iowa State University in 1968 with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Like many of his generation, he answered the call to serve—completing two years of active duty in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam era. That combination of technical education and military discipline shaped everything that followed.
He later earned an MBA in Finance from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1976, adding a business foundation to his engineering roots. It was a combination tailor-made for the energy industry.
A career in energy
Dennis spent nearly 40 years in the energy industry, working across the full spectrum of the business. He started in regulated utilities, moved into bulk energy marketing and trading, and spent significant time in the pipeline industry. Over the decades, he held executive positions in finance, human resources, and business development.
It was a career that gave him a front-row seat to the forces that shape how energy moves through the economy—the regulatory battles, the trading floor dynamics, the infrastructure decisions that ripple through generations. These experiences would later fuel his fiction, giving novels like Black Start and Arbitrage a level of technical authenticity that only comes from having lived it.
Dennis retired in 2005, closing out a career that spanned transformative decades in American energy—from the regulated monopoly era through deregulation, the rise of energy trading, and the early rumblings of the changes still reshaping the industry today.
The writing years
Retirement gave Dennis the time to do what many people only talk about—write the books he’d been carrying around in his head. He started with what he knew best: the real-world challenges facing families as their parents age. Continuum of Care and the Silver Tsunami (2018) drew on personal experience to create a practical guide, using the fictional couple Jim and Jan Smith to walk readers through the maze of retirement community options.
Canadian Reflections (2019) was a different kind of book entirely—a memoir of 35 years of fishing adventures at Canadian lodges. Then came Hickory (2020), a biography of a living legend. In 2022, Dennis turned to fiction with Black Start, an energy industry thriller that earned an audiobook edition on Audible.
He followed that with an updated retirement guide, Sorting Out Retirement Community Options (2023), and most recently Arbitrage—an ambitious historical novel that traces the thread from the collapse of Enron to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
Six books across multiple genres, all grounded in the same thing: a lifetime of real experience and a storyteller’s instinct for what matters.
Career timeline
Explore the books
Fiction, memoir, biography, and practical guides—all from a lifetime of experience.