Taibl is an English instructor and a writer. In this essay, Taibl examines how the episodic structure of Houston's story illuminates the story's larger meaning.

In Pam Houston's second full collection of short stories Waltzing the Cat, readers are introduced to Lucy O'Rourke, a landscape photographer with a penchant for failed relationships. Throughout the series of interlocking stories, Lucy's character is revealed as if by snapshots, where each story is a separate moment in Lucy's life. The episodic form the collection adopts, in which the stories remain separate yet loosely connected, allows for, as Randall Osbourne says in the introduction to his 1999 Salon interview with Houston, the voice of a dawning wisdom, the kind you find and lose repeatedly, and then begin to find more often. By the end of the collection and many of the stories, Lucy is finding wisdom more often and revealing it to...