A CONVERSATION WITH ROBERT REBEIN
You’ve written about a ranching family. Did you grow up on a ranch?
No, I grew up in Dodge City, in an old clapboard-sided farmhouse my parents moved to town when I was three years old and then spent the rest of my childhood remodeling, an experience I write about in “Dragging Wyatt Earp: A Personal History of Dodge City.” My dad and his older brother farmed and ranched together for something like forty years, but for most of my childhood, they also owned an autobody salvage yard, B&B Auto Parts, on Minneola Road in South Dodge City. My dad managed the daily operations of B&B for most of the time I was growing up. But when I was eleven or twelve, my uncle retired, and my dad sold B&B and went back into farming and ranching fulltime. This was probably the single biggest event of my childhood. It meant that instead of working for my dad at B&B, as almost all of our older brothers had done when they were teenagers, my brother Joe and I followed dad into the quicksand of high-stakes, irrigation agriculture. From the age of twelve or thirteen, about the time I was learning to drive, I worked for my dad most summers and on breaks from school on a farm he bought eight miles west of town. It was not what you would call a pastoral, idyllic experience, but more like a trial by fire. I loved working for my dad, but I was not a fan of farming. Far from it. But then, after I left for college and graduate school, my mom and dad sold that farm with its irrigation motors and circles of corn and bought the Lazy R Ranch, which is the model for the Bar W Ranch in the novel. The first time I saw the ranch, I fell in love with it, and that feeling has never changed. It’s still my favorite place in the world and the place I know best. I had a lot of fun imagining my characters living and working out there against a backdrop of chalk bluffs and meandering creeks. All of the place names in the novel, including the names of the pastures and creeks and landmarks like Owl Rock, are taken directly from the Lazy R and my experience of it.
Is this an autobiographical novel? How much did you draw on your own life experiences?
There’s no denying that the autobiographical impulse is strong in me. Two of my previous books were memoirs, and that’s how I got my start as a creative writer. That said, this is a work of fiction through and through. Except for a few incidents like the motorcycle chase toward the end of the book, which was inspired by something I witnessed as a kid growing up in Dodge, everything that happens in the novel is made up or borrowed from someone else’s experience. For example, Wade’s death in the novel is based on the death of an older brother of a close friend of mine. The book does include some autobiographical elements, though. Like me, Annie majored in English at the University of Kansas, studied abroad in England, and came home from a year teaching in North Africa to begin a doctorate at SUNY-Buffalo. Also like me, Annie loves the ranch but always seems to be leaving it for someplace else. She can’t commit to living there on a permanent basis, and yet she can’t stay away either. In that regard, I guess you could say that the emotional core of Annie’s experiences in the novel, including her deep and complicated love for her family and horses and reading and writing, comes directly from me and things I’ve experienced. But that’s how most fiction works, and it’s a long way from a truly autobiographical novel, where pretty much everything that happens to the protagonist happened to the author.
Are any of the characters modeled on people you know?
Some are. Like my dad, Leroy Wagner is former football player. They share a lot of the same DNA: the same workaholic tendencies mixed with a deep love of family and a desire to do the right thing. But at the same time, the demands of writing fiction require a kind of imaginative transformation, a transplanting of the original DNA into an entirely different host or situation, and the results of this transformation are almost always profound, especially in terms of character motivation and action. For example, almost all of Leroy’s actions in the novel are bound up with the fact that his firstborn son, Wade, dies tragically young. My father’s challenges in life were different and led to different outcomes. It’s the same with my mother and Caroline Wagner. They share a lot of the same DNA, including a strong belief in God and the Catholic faith. But in spite of these similarities, Caroline’s actions in the novel, as well as her reasons for those actions, end up being profoundly different than my mother’s actions and motivations. Other characters in the novel are not based on a single person but are more of an amalgamation of several people. Jimmy, for example, is based on at least four different people I can think of, not all of them members of my family. The same is true of Michael and Annie and most of the novel’s supporting cast, including Leroy’s hired man, DW, and the horse trainer Jacob Hess. Basing characters on actual people gives them a ring of authenticity that’s difficult to achieve otherwise. But once these characters are placed in the imagined world of a novel, they are compelled to respond to the demands of that world, not ours. They must come into their own, so to speak. Seeing your characters grow in this way is one of the most wonderful and powerful things about writing fiction. A character you thought you knew inside and out ends up surprising you in ways you might not have thought possible.
You mention that you’ve written memoir in the past. Did you always plan to write a novel?
Absolutely. Writing and publishing a novel has been a dream of mine for almost as long as I can remember. I’ve always loved the immersive nature of novels, the way they can transport you to a different world and allow you to live in that world for days at a time. I get that from my mother, who was a voracious reader and introduced me to writers like Steinbeck and D.H. Lawrence when I was in my early teens. At the same time, I came to creative writing comparatively late. All the way into my late twenties and early thirties, I was a graduate student in English writing literary criticism about novels rather than writing my own. But the desire to write fiction was strong enough that when I finished my doctorate, I postponed looking for a job as a professor and enrolled in an MFA program instead. (I have my wife, Alyssa Chase, to thank for that. She believed in me and encouraged me to chase my dream, and years later, I was able to return the favor, at least in part, by encouraging her to go back to school to get her MFA in writing poetry.) For most of the two years I was in the MFA program at Washington University in St. Louis, I focused on writing fiction, especially the first draft of a novel based on a year I spent teaching English in Kairouan, Tunisia. After our daughter was born and we moved to Indianapolis and I started teaching at IUPUI (now IU Indianapolis), I revised the novel four or five times before my agent at the time took me aside and said, in the nicest possible way, that it might be time to start working on something else. By then, I’d begun writing the essays in “Dragging Wyatt Earp” and “Headlights on the Prairie,” and I decided to shift my focus to writing memoir. And what I found, writing and revising those essays, was that much of what I’d learned about character and dialogue and scenes while working on my Tunisia novel translated beautifully to memoir. It turns out that the opposite is true as well. What I learned about setting and theme writing those books about growing up in Kansas served me extremely well when I began to write fiction set there rather than in England or North Africa.
What was the process of writing the novel? Did it change a lot during the time you were working on it?
One of the things I learned from the five years I spent working on my Tunisia novel was the importance of patience in the writing process. You can’t say to yourself, “I’m going to write for X number of days and do X number of drafts, and when I have done that, the book will be finished.” No. It doesn’t work that way. The book is finished when it’s finished, not before. It could take two drafts, or it could take twenty, and there’s no way of knowing which it will be when you’re starting out. You’ve got to surrender to that, learn to be at peace with it. One of my main goals, when I began working on the material that would become “The Last Rancher,” was to steal some of the joy of the first draft and spread it across all of the subsequent drafts. I think I succeeded in doing that. All told, the book took over twenty years to conceive, write, and revise, but I didn’t spend twenty years working on it. Instead, I would stick with a draft until it was finished, then set it aside and write other things. The first draft, written on a manual typewriter while I was on a four-month sabbatical from teaching, was completed before either “Dragging Wyatt Earp” or “Headlights on the Prairie” were published. But it was just that, a draft. I made no attempt to revise or change anything. It wasn’t until I finished the book tour for “Headlights” that I began revising the novel in earnest, and yet the material still felt fresh and full of possibilities. In all, I revised the book four or five times from start to finish, the last of these coming after Tracy Million Simmons at Meadowlark Press read it and expressed enthusiasm about publishing it. Along with Tracy, I got a lot of wonderful feedback from Alyssa and almost a dozen other writer friends, including the members of my bi-monthly writers’ group. Many things about the novel changed along the way, including aspects of the setting and the way the story is told. In the first three or four drafts, I used a fictional name for the town rather than setting it in contemporary Dodge City. But the biggest change involved how the story is told. In the first couple of drafts, the book was constructed of a series of novella-length point-of-view sections, first Leroy’s story, then Annie’s, then Michael’s, and so on. But between drafts two and three, I changed that in favor of short chapters with alternating points of view every ten or twenty pages. That change alone took more than a year, but the payoff was huge, because it allowed me to infuse the novel with a level of forward momentum and suspense that was lacking in the previous structure. Luckily by then I had learned to relax and enjoy the slow, steady work of revision almost as much as the white-hot of composition, which had always dominated my practice in the past.
Did you have to do any research to complete the book?
Very little, especially compared to my first two books, which were very research heavy. I think that’s because with this book I focused on a world and characters I already knew intimately. Of course, I knew absolutely nothing about the hydroponic cultivation of marijuana, so I had to do some reading to get up to speed on the details and lingo associated with that. But the rest of it, including the accident that puts Leroy in the hospital and the idea of a rancher and his lawyer son bonding over a court case involving a land dispute—that was all based on things I witnessed firsthand watching my dad operate in the world of high-stakes farming and ranching. It’s the same with the horse stuff in the book. Riding horses is a passion of mine, so the problem was never coming up with horsey material but rather containing it, making sure its presence in a particular chapter or scene created a significant payoff for the reader. That said, I did have to do some fact checking along the way. For example, one of the characters in the novel, Jimmy, uses the bed of the dry Arkansas River to travel between the rodeo grounds and Wright Park and the packing plants east of town. Was such a thing even possible? Well, I’m here to say it is. I know because I spent the weekend of my most recent high school reunion driving all over that river in my 2005 Land Rover LR3.
There is a strong theme of work and vocation in the novel—not just farming and ranching, but also legal work, writing and editing, rebuilding engines, washing cattle trucks, and so on. Why did you feel compelled to write so much about your characters’ work lives?
It comes with the territory. In a town like Dodge City, the work of the place is right there in your face all the time. You can see it and smell it and feel it in the air the minute you roll into town—the feedyards and packing plants and grain elevators, all those trucks coming and going at all hours of the day and night. Dodge City is first and foremost a cow town, a bustling, busy place, and everything that happens there feels connected, like it’s all part of the same big enterprise. In that sense, it’s a bit like Nantucket, the island we encounter at the beginning of Melville’s Moby-Dick. Just as there is no nineteenth-century Nantucket without the whaling industry, there is no Dodge City past or present without the cattle industry. Everything and everyone in town is connected to it in one way or another, and most people are connected in multiple ways. For farmers and ranchers, the connection to work runs so deep it becomes a matter of survival. Are we going to get this crop of wheat harvested before the skies darken and it hails? Will the alfalfa burn up before we get the irrigation motor fixed? There’s a blizzard blowing in, and the yearling cattle have walked over an electric fence and disappeared into the blinding white. Can we find them and bring them home before they freeze to death? There’s an inherent drama to all this, and that drama serves to heighten the baseline questions we all have about work. Questions like: Why am I doing what I’m doing? Is this job or profession right for me, what I was put on this earth to do? How would my life be different if I was doing something else, living somewhere else? To me, these are big and interesting questions—as big in their way as the related questions of who do I love and what do I believe?
For all its high stakes and serious subject matter, there’s an undercurrent of humor running through “The Last Rancher.” Can you talk about where that comes from?
I guess the short answer is that it comes from me. It’s part of my sensibility as a writer, how I see people and the world. But I think it’s also part of the genre of the contemporary western. I’m thinking of writers like Larry McMurtry, Thomas McGuane, Louise Erdrich, the Annie Proulx of books like “That Old Ace in the Hole” and “Close Range.” In spite of its serious subject matter, there are some hilarious scenes in a book like Erdrich’s “Love Medicine,” set on an Indian reservation in North Dakota. Similarly, there are some very funny lines in a story like Proulx’s “The Mud Below,” about a Wyoming bull rider who discovers that life is “a hard, fast ride” that ends “in the mud.” You could even say there’s a strain of gallows humor in an otherwise somber and elegiac book like Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” These are authors and books I read over and over as I was trying to find my own voice as a writer of fiction set in the contemporary west, and so it wouldn’t be surprising if some of what these authors are up to in their work rubbed off on me.
Who is the last rancher of the novel’s title? Is it Leroy? Wade? Annie? Jimmy?
That’s a great question, but I don’t think it lends itself to a single answer. Instead, I think readers will want to make up their own minds as they read the book. That’s one of the wonderful things about novels as a genre. While the writer gets to decide what happens and to whom, it’s up to the reader to decide what it all means—and why.
Will there be a sequel to “The Last Rancher”? What are you working on now?
I have no plans to write a sequel, but I’m not ruling it out, either. Some of my favorite authors, including William Faulkner and Richard Russo and Louise Erdrich and Cormac McCarthy, wrote sequels or prequels or both. It makes sense, if you’ve gone to the trouble of creating an interesting world populated by compelling characters. At the same time, now that I’ve finished a contemporary western, I’d love to try my hand at a traditional western, something set in Kansas in the 1860s or 1870s, for example. We’ll see. For now, I’m just happy to be sharing “The Last Rancher” with readers and hearing back what they thought about as they read it. That’s one of the most satisfying things about having a book come out. Finally meeting the readers you’ve been imagining and aiming your book at for so long.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
How important are the novel’s setting to its overall meaning? How would changing the story’s setting to another part of the country or world—for example, Louisiana or Ohio or England—change its impact on readers?
What are the sources of Annie’s ambivalence about Kansas and the Bar W Ranch? How much does this ambivalence play into her relationships with Jeremiah, Jacob, Caroline, and the other characters? What, in your opinion, would be best for Annie in the long run—to leave Kansas and seek her identity elsewhere, or stay and set down roots where she was born and grew up? Why? Is there a third option the novel explores?
Why does Caroline stick it out with Leroy after it becomes clear that their marriage will always come second to the demands of running the Bar W Ranch? What do you make of her contention that while Leroy has been “the love of her life,” Ted Kramer was her “soul mate”? Does the distinction make sense in your mind? Why or why not?
Why do you think Leroy refuses to let Michael or any of his other children other than Wade follow him into farming and ranching? Do you view the decision as selfish, self-sacrificing, pragmatic, self-destructive, something else? What are the consequences of this decision for Leroy, his family, and the Bar W Ranch?
How do the dynamics of birth order play out in this novel? With which character do you empathize the most in this regard? Why? How would the novel be different (or not) if birth order were reversed, and Jimmy was born first, followed by Annie, Michael, and Wade?
At one point in the novel, Caroline muses that Dodge City is “the epitome of a man’s world.” What does she mean by this? What evidence do you see in the novel that this is true or not true? What does this mean for the women in the novel?
How would you rate and describe Leroy as a father? How involved is he in his children’s lives, and what impact does that involvement have on them, both good and bad? To what extent do you see Michael repeating or rejecting Leroy’s example as a father? Which of his children do you think has the most accurate impression of Leroy as a father? Why?
How would this family’s future have been different if Wade had not died? What do you make of Annie’s contention that the memory of Wade has become a kind of Rorschach inkblot test, saying more about the person doing the remembering than the person being remembered?
What is the role of religion in the novel? Would you characterize “The Last Rancher” as a Catholic novel, or Rebein as a Catholic writer? Why or why not?
If you had to guess what each of the characters will be doing and where they will live ten years after the novel ends, what would you say for each? Leroy and Caroline? Michael? Annie? Jimmy? Who do you think has changed the most over the course of the novel? Why?
Note: PDFs for the author’s Q&A and Discussion Questions are available for download by clicking on the link in the Press Kit tab