Robert Rebein is a writer and professor at IUPUI, which is also where I'm currently doing much of my own studying, writing, and teaching during this season of life. Rebein, who has published short stories, essays, and literary criticism, is currently working on a collection of essays called Dragging Wyatt Earp: Essays on Place and Identity. He has given me permission to share some of a recent conversation we had in his office.
Chris: Much of your own writing and thnking deals with place. What do you miss about Dodge City, Kansas?
Robert: My writing does come out of this idea because I grew up in a place with large consequences for staying. Not making a decision usually meant staying. Everyone knew there is nothing for you there unless you decided to make it work in farming, or as a rancher, or as a lawyer. For me, leaving that place has made me appreciate it more and want to go back. So I "go back" by writing about it. I'm not sure if I will live there again or not, but I could. Being away makes you see it more clearly than people that never left. I go back and run into these people who stayed and they want to apologize for not leaving. They want to know why I'd come back. Except maybe the ranchers and other landowners. They don't apologize because they're really connected to the place and have developed a pretty good status. I think in order to write about place, you have to be from one of these really fascinating places or you have to go find these places, like a travel writer might.
Chris: Indianapolis is such a sprawling city. Can you develop the same sort of attachment here as you can in Dodge City, Kansas?
Robert: I think you can, but there's this same insider-outsider factor at work. I live in a German/Irish Catholic enclave on the East side. My kids go to school with others who have parents and grandparents who went to this same school. They have no outside perspective because they never left. A perfect example is this writer Patricia Hampl. She's from Minneapolis and grew up in a Catholic neighborhood. But she got out of there so the place could exist inside her. All this stuff stays in her mind now. In order to write about a place, you have to be able to see and document what's interesting both to people who live there and people who don't.
Chris: Christmas break has basically arrived. What will you be reading?
Robert: Well, I've been going through these Best American Essay collections from 2006-2010. I'm interested in who's good at this genre and why. Some of them are great, but what I'm finding is that it totally depends on the editor. Sometimes I feel like I can write better stuff than the editor picks. Like this 2010 collection, which Christopher Hitchens, who just died, edited. It seems like he just took a bunch out of the same publication. But I love the one Adam Gophnick did, so it seems to really depend on the editor. So when I find something I really like, I say to myself, I'm going to try to do something like that. It always ends up very different than the piece that inspired me, but it's a fun exercise.
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