5Robert Kinerk grew up hearing great Alaska stories. He has recreated many of them in Tales from the Territory. He lived in Alaska from when it was a territory, working as a reporter, as a logger, and an ambulance attendant. He labored in a pulp mill and moonlighted as a night-time disc jockey. His stories are of rugged and often solitary women and men driven by the demands of climate and of distance to rely mostly on themselves. On their own, they thread their way past life's snares and pitfalls. In Tales from the Territory, a reader will discover kids and grown-ups, priests and prostitutes, arsonists and artists working out the adventures and misadventures life presents them. Sometimes they tackle that job rightly, sometimes wrongly. But they always do it humanly, with all the bumps and warts and wanderings that being human entails. They bring to the task of living their accumulated stores of strength and their burdens of frailty. Those burdens and those strengths are at the heart of Tales from the Territory.