Updated: Sep 3, 2021
An action-adventure comedy that follows the adventures of feisty and resourceful 10-year-old Molly Mabray, an Alaska Native girl, her dog Suki, and friends Tooey and Trini on their adventures in epically beautiful Alaska.
That's the slug line for PBS Kids - Molly of Denali (MOD). To me, MOD is the first Alaskan Native lead character to be shown on national tv. Because of this show, my daughter and son will able to watch a character who looks like them and talk about their cultures on national tv. Just having MOD showing is truly special and the crazy part is... I get to tell my kids that I was a part of the show.
If you read any of my earlier blogs, one...you know my grammar isn't an A+ paper...two...you know that I just got in the game of making films. So how did someone like become a writer for a national tv show? Let's press rewind to the beginning of 2018.
Luckily, one of my cousins was a Production Assistant (PA) for WBGH (now GBH)...The company who created MOD... and she told me that they are looking for Alaskan Native Writers about two weeks before the job went public. During this time, I was still in college and I was brand new to making films and still trying to figure out how things work. With some convincing, I updated my film resume, film reel, and my latest script.

With connections of one of my professors, at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, I became friends with the Creative Producer of MOD on Facebook. Within the hour she posted that they were looking for writers, I applied.
With growing up in Alaska on an island...our culture is all I really knew. With learning how to make films and writing scripts... I thought I had a real chance. The only real thing is, my only real script that I wrote....wasn't child appropriate. It was a script that was based on a true story from my childhood...I might write a blog about that process later on.
Fast forward a few months... I get an email saying that I was chosen as one of the six writers. Celebrate! Now within the email it also mentioned that I was traveling to Vancouver, BC, for training in three weeks. I was hesitant on leaving my young family for a couple of weeks. My wife told me that this show can be a huge thing and that I should accept the offer.
I am going to turn this into a 3-4 part series as the training in Vancouver, BC can be a whole blog on its own.