Durango Diaries, The Durango Herald’s twice-a-month storytelling series is back for season three! Please join us at this free event. In this session, local storytellers share how they learned to craft a perfect story. Storytellers include: Ann Butler is a former award-winning staff writer and columnist for The Durango Herald. Through her 17 years at the newspaper, she wrote the popular Neighbors column, spent more than a decade documenting community members’ deaths in obituaries and covered numerous beats in the community. She spent her early career working in international business. A family tragedy - a car wreck where her mother was killed and her father seriously injured - led her to reinvent her life and end up in a new career in journalism. By telling the community’s stories, she changed her own. Esther Belin is a writer and multimedia artist. Her writing is widely anthologized, and her latest volume of poetry, “Of Cartography,” examines identity politics, checkerboard land status, and the interplay of words (abstraction) and image (realism). In 2000, she won the American Book Award for her first book of poetry, “From the Belly of My Beauty.” She holds degrees from Antioch University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and the University of California at Berkeley. She is a Navajo Nation citizen and lives in southwest Colorado with her four daughters and husband. Sarah Syverson is the co-Founder andco-Producer of The Raven Narratives, a live storytelling event and subsequent podcast that she and her fellow co-producer, Tom Yoder, started 3 years ago. It showcases storytellers from La Plata and Montezuma Counties. In 2018 they also showcased storytellers from San Juan County and worked with youth storytellers as well. She studied improvisation and sketch writing at Second City in Chicago and has written, produced and starred in humorously poignant original one-woman shows throughout the Southwest with great success. This event is free to the public. For more information or to sign up for emails about upcoming sessions, email durangodiaries@durangoherald.com