One Friday morning near the end of January, the 10 participants in the Alaska Native Playwrights Project gathered at Anchorage's Alaska Native Heritage Center. On the coffee table, a box of donuts sat next to a plate piled high with smoked salmon. Laptops and notebooks shared table space with mukluks and stacks of Native-made baskets. Conversations about lunch options mingled with discussions about seal oil and birch bark. And before the day's seminars began, all the writers filed outside for a smudging ceremony to ask for genius, inspiration and healing.

It was the last day of a weeklong playwriting intensive. After six days of workshops, roundtable discussions with teaching artists and writing homework, the playwrights-in-training were preparing to head back to their homes, scattered across the state. In the coming months, with the help of a mentor, each will write an original play to bring his or her stories and experiences to the stage.

While each playwright came to the project with a specific idea to bring to life onstage, they weren't ready to get specific about their stories. With 10 months left to write, it's still early in the process.

"It was really hard to choose one (story)," said Kavelina Torres, one of the newly-minted playwrights, during a lunch break. Torres sat at a table in the Heritage Center's theater, checking her Facebook account, while her tablemate, Maureen Mayo, flipped through a notebook. Both women are from the Fairbanks area -- although Torres is quick to specify that she actually lives in nearby North Pole.

A college student and mother of four, Torres applied for the project because she wants to see Alaska Natives better represented in entertainment, and because she worries about Native languages disappearing. Torres, who is Yup'ik, Inupiaq and Athabascan, began studying Yup'ik at the University of Alaska Fairbanks after she realized she was missing out on an important part of her heritage.

"Why don't I speak it?" she said. "'Cause my mom didn't teach me. Why didn't she speak it? 'Cause her mom didn't teach her."

When she was growing up, Torres said, the people on TV didn't look like the people she knew.

"How come there's no brown people?" she remembered thinking. "How come there's no tan people? How come they all have perfect teeth?" She said she dreams of turning on her television and seeing real stories about Alaska Natives and "the drama of real people" -- not documentary footage of smiling "happy savages."

"I have my own drama and I still laugh a lot," Torres said. "That doesn't mean I'm a happy savage."

Mayo, who is Koyukon Athabascan, claims to be a grandmother, although at first glance she appears to be far too young. She says it must be all the fish she eats. Mayo raised six children (five of her own, plus a nephew) and now has four grandkids ages 1 to 10. Although she's studied all kinds of art and culture, both Native and Western, the Alaska Native Playwrights Project is Mayo's first foray into the theater.

"I had a dream once that my play is based on," she said. While she had never really considered trying her hand at playwriting, the project seemed like a good opportunity to bring her dream to life.

It's a big undertaking, and one that will consume a good amount of her energy in the coming months.

"It feels a little bit challenging and a little bit satisfying," she said. "I have a busy life and I work full-time, so I'll have to get organized."