David Mogen, author of 'Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories'

When David Mogen was eight years old, he looked up from his Roy Rogers comic book and told his father that he wished they lived in the West. He dad snorted and asked, "Where the hell do you think we are?"

Where they were was 35 miles north of Highway 2, in the small town of Whitewater, Montana.

Young Mogen's confusion about "The West" in which he lived and "The West' he saw in movies, TV, and comic books, as well as the stories he read in library books, turned into his career as an English professor at Colorado State University. During that career (from which he recently retired), he published four scholarly books and two anthologies exploring literature and the frontier mentality. Now, he's written a memoir that includes stories about his parents and grandparents through a homesteader-rancher-myth-of-the-west lens.

Hear a few of those stories, find out what the word "honyocker" means, and ponder the connection between cyberpunk science fiction and the western frontier.