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In the immense, road less expanse of the Far North, storytelling has thrived for many generations. Stories range from harrowing survival adventures to tales of other exotic people, places, and cultures. This anthology captures some of these stories as told by rural Alaskans.

This volume is a sequel to Authentic Alaska. The majority of writers whose work appears here have lived in rural Alaska for many years. This anthology offers glimpses of regular people meeting life's everyday challenges while experiencing the same struggles, joys, and idiosyncrasies that humans face everywhere; adolescents coming of age, struggles with addiction, regional idiom, and cross-cultural challenges.

Susan B. Andrews lives north of the Arctic Circle in Kotzebue, Alaska, with her husband, John Creed, and family. Susan is a professor of journalism and humanities at the Kotzebue branch of the University of Alaska, Chukchi College, where she has taught since 1989. Her students attend class via computer-assisted distance education primarily from remote villages throughout rural Alaska. Prior to joining the UA Faculty, Susan was a television producer for the Kotzebue-based Northwest Arctic Borough School District, creating television documentaries on Alaska Native issues. Before coming to Kotzebue, she was anchor and news director of KTVF-TV, the CBS affiliate in Fairbanks. A former ballet dancer, Susan completed her graduate work in journalism at the University of Oregon following a comparative-literature degree from Smith College in Massachusetts. As an undergraduate she also attended the University of Paris. Professor Andrews is the recipient of a Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. Susan's writing interests include fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. She loves living in Kotzebue for "being able to walk everywhere and having the time with family that otherwise would be spent commuting and running errands."

John Creed is a professor of journalism and humanities at the University of Alaska's Chukchi College in Kotzebue, where has distance taught students throughout Alaska since 1987. Before Joining the UA faculty, he covered business and education for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. He also edited the Tusraayugaat, a bilingual newspaper published in the early 1980s by the Kotzebue-based Northwest Arctic School District. He also has taught school in Sutton, Massachusetts and in Noatak, an Inupiaq village north of Kotzebue. Professor Creed studied English at the University of Massachusetts, Irish literature and history at the University College Dublin in Ireland, physical education at the University of Oslo in Norway, and teacher education at the University of Montana. He completed his graduate work in journalism at the University of Oregon. He enjoys skiing, mountain biking, reading, and writing. The best thing about living in rural Alaska, he says, is "being able to raise a close-knit family at a much slower pace that mainstream American life." In the late 1980s John and Susan founded Chukchi News and Information Service, a cultural journalism project hat features University of Alaska student writing in newspapers, magazines, anthologies, and on websites.