Whether they were actually Hungarian or Bohemian, "Hunkies" or "Bohunks," or even from Eastern Europe at all, to the old ranchers of the Great Plains, the farmers and settlers who moved in and fenced off the open land were no-account "Honyockers." And to Honyockers like David Mogen's people, who built lives in the face of great difficulty and prejudice, the name came to bear all the meaning and power of their hard-won home place. It is this sense of place, of tenacious if uneasy belonging, that David Mogen traces through his family history inHonyocker Dreams. Beginning with his father's reminiscences as he surveys the Montana landscape, Mogen weaves a narrative of memory and history, of the dreams and disappointments of working-class farmers, cowboys, and miners among his ancestors, and of the post-frontier world of Indian reservations and farming towns that endure on the Montana "Hi-Line," the flat expanse of Big Sky country that lies hard against the Canadian border east of the Rockies. From the frontier world of his parents and pioneer ancestors to the boom-and-bust tales about growing up in the small-town world of his own Montana childhood in the 1950s, Mogen travels full circle to recent journeys that reveal the paradoxical burdens and strengths of his father's cowboy legacy as well as the hidden pain and healing power of his mother's homesteading heritage. His is a journey that opens a window on a unique but little-known region of Montana and the West.

Blending memoir, cultural history, and a literary perspective, Facing It bears witness to controversies like Tellico and Chernobyl, global warming and local drought. But rather than merely drowning readers in waves of ecological angst, M. Jimmie Killingsworth seeks alternative images and episodes to invoke presence without crippling the hope for survival and sustenance in places and communities of value. In deft, highly accessible prose, Killingsworth takes the reader through a Cold-War childhood, an adolescence colored by anti-war and ecological activism, and an adulthood darkened by terrorism and climate change. Inviting us on walks through tame suburbias (riddled with environmental abuse) and wild deserts and mountains (shadowed by industrial development), he celebrates the survival of natural beauty and people living close to the earth while questioning truisms associated with both economic advancement and environmental purity. Above all, this book invites the reader to face it: to look with wide-open eyes on a new nature that will never be the same, but that continues to offer opportunities for renewal and advancement of life.

Honyocker Dreams: Montana Memories dramatizes "recovery" both as healing and as reconstruction of a past that haunts and enriches the present. David Mogen's narrative begins with his dying father's reminiscences as he surveys the Montana landscape, and then weaves through his own memories about the postfrontier world of Indian reservations and farming towns that endure on the Montana "Hi-Line," that flat expanse of Big Sky country that lies hard against the Canadian border east of the Rockies. Mogen's journey of recovery includes heartfelt, often humorous stories defining his family's "honyocker" history, shaped by the dreams and disappointments of working-class farmers, cowboys, and miners. The narrative chronicles boom-and-bust tales about growing up in small-town Montana in the 1950s, about the culture shock associated with leaving the Hi-Line in the 1960s, about a healing gift from Blackfeet relatives, and about traveling to Ireland to reflect on family ties to Marcus Daly, Butte, Montana's "Copper King." Mogen suggests how the eras of his own childhood and the frontier world of his ancestors have shaped him and our American heritage as we move further into the twenty-first century. David Mogen is professor emeritus of English at Colorado State University. He is the coeditor of several books, including Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature, and is the author of Ray Bradbury and Wilderness Visions: The Western Theme in Science Fiction Literature.