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Headlights on the Prairie: Essays on Home
At the long-term care facility where Robert Rebein's father lands after a horrific car crash, a shadow box hangs next to each room, its contents suggesting something of the occupant's life. In Headlights on the Prairie, Rebein has created a literary shadow box of sorts, a book in which moments of singular grace and grit encapsulate a life and a world.
In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky, these essays bring a storyteller's gifts to life's dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory. Here too we find the darker tales of damaged young men returning from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a small-town nursing home grandiloquently named Manor of the Plains.
Whether contemplating a fiery crash at a race track, coming to terms with an aging parent, or navigating the last days of a beloved family dog, Rebein offers a subtle, unsparing, often moving look at the moments that go into making a writer and a man. Seen in sharp detail, and recalled from a distance, his is a story of how a man can leave his home on the prairie--and yet never really get out of Dodge.
In the tradition of memoirs such as Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life and Ivan Doig's This House of Sky, these essays bring a storyteller's gifts to life's dramas, large and small. Following his award-winning turn on his hometown of Dodge City, Rebein takes us back to the high plains world where his family has farmed and ranched since the 1920s. It is a world populated by feedlot cowboys, stock-car drivers, and farm kids dreaming of basketball glory. Here too we find the darker tales of damaged young men returning from war, long-haul truckers addicted to crystal meth, and the sadly heroic residents of a small-town nursing home grandiloquently named Manor of the Plains.
Whether contemplating a fiery crash at a race track, coming to terms with an aging parent, or navigating the last days of a beloved family dog, Rebein offers a subtle, unsparing, often moving look at the moments that go into making a writer and a man. Seen in sharp detail, and recalled from a distance, his is a story of how a man can leave his home on the prairie--and yet never really get out of Dodge.
- GenresNonfictionMemoirEssays
184 pages, Paperback
Published July 21, 2017
31 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 16, 2021
After reading and loving Gilead recently, I’ve been wanting to read more Midwestern authors, and I was curious what was out there set in my home state. This led me to Robert Rebein’s collection of vignettes about growing up in Dodge City, Kansas. My mother grew up on a farm in western Kansas, and while I’ll never fully understand her experience, I recognize in Rebein’s writing that Midwestern sensibility which is so a part of her. Hard worker doesn’t even begin to cover it.
Rebein has constructed a moving account of loving and leaving a place, a place about which he has “complex and wildly ambivalent feelings.” That feels right to me.
There are some really gorgeous bits of writing in this book, full of human bravery and tragedy.
Particularly affecting is Rebein’s description of a trucker he met while working at a filling station in high school, a man named Earl who shares his journey out of addiction: “The hand of God just kinda reached out and stopped me, I guess.” Earl relapses just a few pages later in the narrative, and has to be “handed down from his truck like Jesus descending from the cross.”
I loved this paragraph from the last story, so I’m just going to leave it here. (Go read this book, especially if you have any ties to Kansas!)
But maybe that’s the way with all of our important memories. We take the raw material of the past and use it to construct a story in the present. Maybe that’s what my father had been up to in that hospital room in Wichita. In the bright, focusing light of his delirium, he’d relived the Howell years not as tragedy but as the story of a time he’d called out to his sons for help, and those sons had responded with a burst of speed-- no questions or delay tactics, just run run run.
Rebein has constructed a moving account of loving and leaving a place, a place about which he has “complex and wildly ambivalent feelings.” That feels right to me.
There are some really gorgeous bits of writing in this book, full of human bravery and tragedy.
Particularly affecting is Rebein’s description of a trucker he met while working at a filling station in high school, a man named Earl who shares his journey out of addiction: “The hand of God just kinda reached out and stopped me, I guess.” Earl relapses just a few pages later in the narrative, and has to be “handed down from his truck like Jesus descending from the cross.”
I loved this paragraph from the last story, so I’m just going to leave it here. (Go read this book, especially if you have any ties to Kansas!)
But maybe that’s the way with all of our important memories. We take the raw material of the past and use it to construct a story in the present. Maybe that’s what my father had been up to in that hospital room in Wichita. In the bright, focusing light of his delirium, he’d relived the Howell years not as tragedy but as the story of a time he’d called out to his sons for help, and those sons had responded with a burst of speed-- no questions or delay tactics, just run run run.
January 9, 2026
Really good collection of essays by a local author. I’ve actually met Rebein, once at Bookmama’s Bookstore in Irvington, and again - in 2024 - at the Indiana Historical Society’s Holiday Author Fair. I’ve also read his book, “Dragging Wyatt Earp” and own another book of his (also purchased at the 2024 book fair). As a (roughly speaking) contemporary of Rebein’s I found most of this collection quite relatable.
May 2, 2018
This collection of essays is a beautifully written study of growing up in Kansas and how those years influence everything that comes after. Every essay speaks to me about being a teenager (I'm roughly the same age as the author) even though I grew up in California, not Kansas, and the nostalgia one can feel at many points in one's life. I highly recommend this book.
August 15, 2019
Robert Rebein has written an excellent book of essays about the rite of passages of growing up on a Kansas farm. Each of the essays are separate, but they are also linked in a theme of how youth is perceived, how it forms adulthood and how, looking back, it is viewed with a more forgiving eye.
That's pretty prevalent in his last essay about his father's stay in a nursing home after a serious accident.
In Headlights, Rebein writes of working on his father's farm, of herding cattle that have fled the farm and entered town, and of avoiding that work by spending a summer toiling at a truck stop. He also writes of his basketball career, comparing it the stellar career of Pete Maravich who played for dismal teams. Rebein was the same, a star scoring 20-30 points a game, but playing on his high school team that would be lucky to win 10 of 30 games in a season.
There's also an essay about a car he had and later one about his daughter's lack of true interest in obtaining a driver's license, a contrast to the days when Rebein saw having a car as total freedom. Now, he said, youngsters would rather have their iPhones than cars if offered a choice.
The writing is crisp, the flow perfect, the ideas presented are great. This is a good book for anyone wanting to write memoirs to study because the themes are not blatantly exposed, but rather shown with clear examples and enjoyable writing.
That's pretty prevalent in his last essay about his father's stay in a nursing home after a serious accident.
In Headlights, Rebein writes of working on his father's farm, of herding cattle that have fled the farm and entered town, and of avoiding that work by spending a summer toiling at a truck stop. He also writes of his basketball career, comparing it the stellar career of Pete Maravich who played for dismal teams. Rebein was the same, a star scoring 20-30 points a game, but playing on his high school team that would be lucky to win 10 of 30 games in a season.
There's also an essay about a car he had and later one about his daughter's lack of true interest in obtaining a driver's license, a contrast to the days when Rebein saw having a car as total freedom. Now, he said, youngsters would rather have their iPhones than cars if offered a choice.
The writing is crisp, the flow perfect, the ideas presented are great. This is a good book for anyone wanting to write memoirs to study because the themes are not blatantly exposed, but rather shown with clear examples and enjoyable writing.
March 25, 2022
I had the good fortune of meeting Robert Rebein when he came to visit the University of South Florida's Creative Writing program--I was thankful to meet someone else from Indiana (though arguably he had settled down there, as he lived a long part of his live in Kansas, where the book takes place). Robert has captured what I like to think of as those stories your family recaps after the filling up a dinner plate made by an aunt or Grandma on Memorial Day or Thanksgiving or during a summer weekend and sitting down on the couch and other chairs brought into the living and dining rooms. I would call them almost "family legends" in the way he recounts them, though they are true. They have a beautiful story framework, about everything from truck stops to horse ownership to aging dogs, and the characters are rich and very human. I need to read more books like this. Maybe these chapters have a Midwest quality to them, or maybe it's like a heartland thing--it's not the bustle and stimulation and adventures of a large city, nor is it about exploring places far away. These are the stories that sit beside us with roast beef and cheesy potatoes and ask us how things have been in between bites. They're the stories we tell and re-tell with those near to us. 5 out of 5 for me.
March 25, 2018
I thoroughly enjoyed this book of essays. The author grew up on this ranch in Southwest Kansas. Now he just visits two weeks a year with his wife and children. There was a wide range of topics. He spoke of horses, working in a truck stop, basketball, just whatever he was experiencing. I really liked his writing style.
March 17, 2021
Fantastic memoirs about growing up in rural Kansas. Some of the standout essays from the collection include "Bullet in the Brain," "Biscuits and Meth," "A Horse in the Country," and "Home on the Range."
July 19, 2017
Great read!
February 18, 2019
A good follow up from Dragging Wyatt Earp. I like both books. Having grown up as a farm kid in Central KS and later living in Western KS I can relate to the stories of his youth.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews